World War II April 2022

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MEL S K O O R B GOES R A W O T

C I M O C Y R A D N E THE LEG K­­­­—WITH LOOKS BAC COURSE­— HUMOR, OF S IN ON HIS DAY UNIFORM

PAluU.Ss. SUB COMMANDER’S

ICE ULTIMATE SACRIF ENCE IG L L E T IN H IS IT HOW A BR LED DOZENS OF BLUNDER KILTS IN HOLLAND ALLIED AGEN Brooks, age 18, strikes a pose shortly before shipping out for Europe in early 1945.

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A Wehrmacht unit in the Netherlands patrols the streets of Middelburg in August 1942— more than two years into the German occupation.

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WORLD WAR II

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A P R IL 2022 ENDORSED BY THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

F E AT U R E S COVE R STO RY

30 PRIVATE MEL, REPORTING FOR DUTY

The comic mastermind behind 1967’s The Producers experienced army life and the war in Europe firsthand, and looks back at age 95 with characteristic humor MEL BROOKS

38 THE ENGLAND GAME

Despite ample red flags, dozens of British agents parachuted into Holland—directly into German hands ROBERT HUTTON

P O RT F O L I O

48 WE HAVE RETURNED

A unique collection of artifacts testifies to the ferocity and the humanity of the fight in the Philippines

56 ABOVE AND BEYOND

When a fearless sub commander called out “Take her down!” he knew exactly what it would cost him STEVEN TRENT SMITH

W E A P O N S M A N UA L

64 TOP CLASS

The Soviet Union’s S-class submarine

66 MONEY TO BURN

American and Soviet occupation forces in a defeated Germany found themselves rolling in cash—legal and otherwise DON SMITH

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D E PA RT M E N T S

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8 MAIL 12 WORLD WAR II TODAY 22 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER 24 NEED TO KNOW 26 TRAVEL

Portsmouth, England: D-Day’s launchpad

72 REVIEWS

Alex Kershaw’s Against All Odds; A War of Empires; more

76 BATTLE FILMS

Who’s the real victim in 1974’s The Execution of Private Slovik?

79 CHALLENGE 8O FAMILIAR FACE APRIL 2022

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WWII Online WORLDWARII.com

Michael A. Reinstein CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER

VOL. 36, NO. 6 APRIL 2022

EDITOR

KAREN JENSEN Larry Porges SENIOR EDITOR Kirstin Fawcett ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jerry Morelock, Jon Guttman HISTORIANS David T. Zabecki CHIEF MILITARY HISTORIAN Paul Wiseman NEWS EDITOR Brian Walker GROUP ART DIRECTOR Melissa A. Winn DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Guy Aceto, Jennifer E. Berry PHOTO EDITORS ADVISORY BOARD

Captain John Cromwell goes down with the fatally stricken USS Sculpin in this work by navy veteran Fred Freeman.

Readers intrigued by the captain’s brave sacrifice in this issue’s “Above and Beyond” (page 56) by Steven Trent Smith will want to check out this stirring story by the same author:

Why Captain John Cromwell Chose to Go Down with the Ship

In November 1943, a U.S. Navy officer went to extraordinary lengths to protect a vital American secret from the enemy.

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CONTRIBUTORS MEL BROOKS (“Private Mel, Reporting for Duty”) is one of the few entertainers to earn all four major prizes in the entertainment field: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. His career began writing for television’s Your Show of Shows (1950-54); he later helped create the series Get Smart (1965-70). Today he’s probably best associated with a string of comedy films, including The Producers (1967), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). In 2016, President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of Arts.

But long before any of this, Brooks was a teen navigating army life and a war in Europe; his account of these experiences is adapted from his 2021 memoir, Mel Brooks: All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (Ballantine).

ROBERT HUTTON (“The England Game”) is a British journalist and author. He first came across this issue’s story of British cryptographer Leo Marks and the successful German counterintelligence operation against British agents in Holland as he was researching his 2018 book, Agent Jack, another spy story that doesn’t always reflect brilliantly on the English.

COVER STORY BROOKS

BRENDAN SAINSBURY (“D-Day’s Launchpad”) is a

British writer based in Canada. He grew up in the southern English county of Hampshire, not far from the city of Portsmouth, before moving to British Columbia in the early 2000s. He has authored 60 Lonely Planet travel guidebooks and written for the BBC and the Globe and Mail.

DON SMITH (“Money to Burn”) is a retired Army

D. SMITH

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STEVEN TRENT SMITH (“Above and Beyond”) learned about navy commander Howard W. Gilmore, the subject of his latest feature, while researching sub-force Medal of Honor recipients for his 2003 book, Wolf Pack. Smith is an Emmyaward-winning TV photojournalist and author who lives in northwest Montana.

PORTRAITS BY JOHANNA GOODMAN

HUTTON

Reserve officer with assignments in field artillery and military intelligence. He became fascinated with occupied and Cold War Berlin when, as a young man, he saw the Berlin Wall and toured the divided city’s East and West sides. For more than 20 years, he has served as an instructor and war game controller for multiple Department of Defense agencies. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

WORLD WAR II

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U.S. soldiers at Dachau were first blindsided—and then enraged—by railcars filled with dead prisoners.

STOPPED DEAD ON THE TRACKS NUMBERED DAYS

I have read about and heard American veterans of World War II who said that after the December 1944 Malmedy massacre, no German soldier with an SS uniform lived to see a prison camp. I am amazed

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that even more SS guards did not meet the same fate as those that American G.I.s executed at Dachau in April 1945 after their acts of unbelievable inhumanity.

Robert Lyon West Brookfield, Mass.

KNEE-JERK REACTION

With regard to Joseph Connor’s article, it should be noted that G.I.s universally stated that they were not prepared for anything they would find in concentration camps such as Dachau. While the very pinnacle of American leadership had received hushed reports beginning in early 1943 that horrors were occurring in occupied Europe, U.S. troops had not been

U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM ARCHIVES

MY BOY SCOUT LEADER Fred Orndorf served with the 45th Infantry Division from Sicily to Dachau to Munich. On one Scout trip in the 1960s, he talked about Dachau. Just as described in Joseph Connor’s December article [“Trigger Point”], Fred told us of the 45th’s approach to the concentration camp along the railroad tracks, their discovery of the death train, and the devastating effect it had on all the men. He also mentioned a terrible stench he would never forget.

What impressed me the most was what he said next: “Until we reached Dachau, we did not know why we were fighting in Europe.”

John H. Borowy Leesburg, Va.

WORLD WAR II

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FROM TOP: PHOTO12/UIG/GETTY IMAGES; BUNDESARCHIV BILD 146-1969-171-29 FOTO: FRIEDRICH FRANZ BAUER

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FROM THE EDITOR

FROM TOP: PHOTO12/UIG/GETTY IMAGES; BUNDESARCHIV BILD 146-1969-171-29 FOTO: FRIEDRICH FRANZ BAUER

U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM ARCHIVES

Inmates at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria welcome their liberators, the 11th Armored Division, in May 1945.

forewarned that such camps even existed until the majority had been liberated. This adds some perspective to the confusion, mayhem, and anger that erupted among the troops of Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks during Dachau’s liberation.

A visceral hatred of the SS is a common theme among those veterans who experienced the camps. My uncle, a member of the 41st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron of the 11th Armored Division, opened the gates and liberated the Mauthausen slave labor camp in western Austria; he said he had no idea what he was walking into. He remembered that during the cleanup of corpses, an SS officerturned-prisoner had refused to work, declaring to a British sergeant that officers could not be forced to work under the Geneva Conventions. The sergeant pulled out his pistol and told him to shut up and get back to his job. The SS officer continued his refusal, at which point the sergeant shot him dead between the eyes. My wide-eyed uncle recalled that all SS members were highly motivated for the remainder of the day.

Until I have endured months of exhaustion, bad food, diarrhea, and nerve-gripping fear, it would be quite difficult for me to sit in judgment of the reaction that was reflexive toward such unheard-of brutality. The response may not have been ethically excusable, but it is highly understandable.

Christopher Hoffmann Colorado Springs, Colo.

JUST THE FACTS

Many thanks to Joseph Connor for his fine article on the atrocities that transpired during the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. His writing was meticulously objective and fair-minded, something we do not often encounter in these days of radical revisionist history.

Richard Veit Robinson, Texas

When I heard that Mel Brooks had just written a memoir—a pandemic project for the 95-year-old comedian—I immediately reached out to his publisher. As someone who’d grown up loving The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, I wanted to get his iconic voice in the magazine.

I knew he had served in the war and wondered how someone like him would tell a story like that.

The result—very Mel—is on page 30. His war wasn’t all funny, of course, but humor helped him navigate war’s tough terrain.

For the legendary director, producer, writer, and actor, comedy is an essential tool for life. “It has the most to say about the human condition,” he says, “because if you laugh you can get by.”

—Karen Jensen

WOLFF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING

“It gave me great pleasure to learn that already since 14 days ago, one train goes daily with 5000 passengers of the ‘Chosen People’ to Treblinka.”

Karl Wolff, whose 1945 peace negotiations with the Allies were Karl Wolff, described in Nicholas Reynolds’s circa 1937 December article “What to Make of SS General Karl Wolff ?,” wrote these words in a letter addressed to Dr. Albert Ganzenmüller, state secretary of the Reich Ministry of Transport, on August PLEASE SEND 13, 1942. Wolff was thanking Ganzenmüller LETTERS TO: for providing the trains necessary to transWorld War II port Jews in Poland to the infamous death 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor, camp’s gas chambers. Like so many other SS Arlington, VA 22203 officers trying to save themselves from postOR E-MAIL: war justice, Wolff lied in 1964 when he told worldwar2@historynet.com the West German court that he had been Please include your name, unaware of the Holocaust’s full magnitude address, and daytime telephone number. until March 1945.

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TAKE A SEAT, PLEASE

Hitler’s chair

Ribbentrop

EAGLE EYE

December’s “Reviews” section featured an image of Hitler speaking at the Reichstag. The caption lists the date as December 11, 1941. However, the lower middle section shows a man sitting next to an empty chair. The man looks like Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, who, at that time, would have been in British custody. Was that man Hess, or was the date incorrect?

Charlie Hauser Bensalem, Penn.

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Wolff may not have been as evil as most of the SS generals in Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s inner circle, but that’s faint praise considering his active involvement in facilitating mass murder. In this reader’s view, Wolff was a senior-level SS war criminal who should have been hanged despite any good he may have done in invoking peace.

Scott Wallace Leesburg, Va.

of his more cynical Nazi comrades is that he appeared for long stretches to have convinced himself that he was an upstanding German patriot. But if Wolff had ever had any hopes for redemption, he would have had to admit the murderous truth, as his daughter later did to herself and to the world. At the end of the day, there’s little to admire in him.

Nicholas Reynolds responds: I appreciate Mr. Wallace’s letter; he and I are not far apart in our view of the SS general. Karl Wolff was either lying, delusional, or some combination of the two. The difference between him and some

Correction: Our December book review of Ann Hagedorn’s Sleeper Agent mistakenly referred to Vladimir Putin as the “Soviet president” rather than Russia’s president.

FROM TOP: GAMMA-KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES; ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES

Hess

Editor’s note: It could have been one of our “Challenge” images, but it was, in fact, a goof: Mr. Hauser is right that the provided date is incorrect; the image at left is not from December 11, 1941, but from January 30, 1939. Hess, who was arrested six months before Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, was the telltale clue. The actual December 1941 photo is above. Seated in Hess’s former spot next to the empty seat (Hitler’s chair) is Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi Germany’s minister of foreign affairs from 1938-45.

WORLD WAR II

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WWII TODAY

REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY PAUL WISEMAN

OPPOSITE: USMC PHOTO; INSET: USMC ARCHIVES: TOP RIGHT: R.T. SMITH VIA BRAD SMITH

IWO JIMA “GHOST SHIPS” RISE FROM THE DEAD

Seismic activity around the Pacific island of Iwo Jima has raised into view dozens of Japanese ships that the United States sunk in 1945 for use as breakwaters.

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OPPOSITE: USMC PHOTO; INSET: USMC ARCHIVES: TOP RIGHT: R.T. SMITH VIA BRAD SMITH

VOLCANIC ACTIVITY has raised about two dozen Japanese “ghost ships”—crewless vessels—sunk during the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima.

Eruptions from the underwater volcano Fukutoku-Okanoba pushed the former Japanese transport ships up and into view, along with sections of seabed. Helicopter footage from the Japanese broadcaster All-Nippon News showed the ships beached on the western side of Iwo Jima.

Advancing toward the Japanese mainland, American Marines attacked Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945. In 36 days of brutal fighting, 70,000 Marines fought 21,000 Japanese troops.

Americans suffered 7,000 killed and 19,000 wounded, and took only 216 Japanese prisoners; the rest of the defenders perished. The Japanese ships exposed by the volcanic eruptions had been scuttled by the U.S. Navy after the battle. The wrecks were deliberately placed to form a breakwater to keep waves away from disembarking troops and equipment.

The volcano has been active since August. The increased seismic activity in the area has raised concerns of an eruption of Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, considered one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes—a major eruption would likely obliterate the island and cause a tsunami capable of inundating southern Japan and coastal China.

Due to a build-up of subterranean magma since 1945, the beaches the U.S. forces landed on are now nearly 60 feet above the ocean’s surface.

The Flying Tigers’ service in Asia is being saluted on the air group’s 80th anniversary.

U.S. AND CHINA CELEBRATE THE FLYING TIGERS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY of the Flying Tigers’ tour of duty in Asia gave the United States and China a chance to recall a fading memory: in 1941, they were allies against Imperial Japan, not the bitter economic and ideological rivals they are today.

In November, surviving Tigers celebrated the anniversary with officials from both countries. The online meeting came as President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met via video link in an effort to work on the vast differences between them over human rights, trade, and other issues. “Our two countries should carry forward the friendship forged in battle by our people, rather than falling into misunderstanding, miscalculation, or even conflict and confrontation,” Chinese ambassador to Washington Qin Gang said later. According to an Associated Press account, Qin suggested that the Flying Tigers could serve as an example for cooperation on global issues like COVID-19 and climate change.

In a plan okayed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 99 volunteer American pilots—many of them enticed by pay that was double what they made in the U.S. Army Air Corps—traveled to Asia in the spring and summer of 1941 along with about 200 support crew to help improve China’s air defenses against Japan. They were specifically charged with protecting planes ferrying supplies over the Himalayas— the so-called “Hump”—to support Chiang Kai-shek’s beleaguered Nationalist Chinese forces. “It was some of the most difficult flying in the world,” Flying Tiger veteran Robert Moore told the AP. “You could fly on a clear day from Assam [in northeastern India] to China by following the shining planes that had gone down.”

Formally known as the American Volunteer Group, the Tigers didn’t actually see combat until nearly two weeks after Pearl Harbor. They were credited with downing nearly 300 Japanese aircraft. According to the Defense Department, the Tigers lost 23 pilots—10 in action, 3 in Japanese attacks on AVG bases, and 10 in accidents.

While the name “Flying Tigers” initially referred to the first group of volunteer Americans who flew for China in 1941-42, the term was extended after the war to include airmen in the 23rd Fighter Group and later the Fourteenth Air Force who took up the mantle in China after the original Flying Tigers disbanded in July 1942.

Speaking from Denver and wearing a pilot’s hat, Flying Tiger vet Bill Peterson remembered his experience with pride: “I just plain love the Chinese people,” he said. “If you ever need us again, we will always be there to help you.”

APRIL 2022

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13 1/23/22 10:07 AM

SOLDIER SURVEYS PUBLISHED VIRGINIA TECH UNIVERSITY published the transcripts of 65,000 pages of extraordinary wartime surveys of American G.I.s on December 7, the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The comments at the heart of “The American Soldier in World War II” project, financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities, were transcribed online by hundreds of volunteers. (A story on the project’s early days appeared in the February 2020 issue of World War II.) The War Department ordered the anonymous surveys in late 1941 in an effort to get an unvarnished view of the army experience—and thereby improve it. Nearly half a million troops stationed across the globe answered the survey. They did not hold back. While at times expressing their patriotism and support for the war effort, they also criticized everything from uninspiring leadership to bad food. Black soldiers complained of discrimination, while some White servicemen expressed the bitterly racist views that were common at the time. Project director Edward Gitre, a historian at Virginia Tech who in 2009 rediscovered the microfilmed surveys at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, commented, “It does speak to a generation…. The good, the bad, the ugly, heroic, not heroic.”

14

Some excerpts: “You people can’t care for us over here in the jungles… your folks there at home (have) a good bed & plenty of chow. We eat ours out of cans. Powder eggs & milk. Give us some of this King’s stuff & let us enjoy our life.”

“The Army would be a better place to live in, and the morale higher, if the Officers and many non-coms would not think that they are so high and mighty. Also that the privates are human.”

“I’ll fight if necessary to prevent racial equality. I’ll never salute a negro officer and I’ll not take orders from a negroe [sic]. I’m sick of the army’s method of treating these inferior swine as if they were human.”

“Why did you induct us in the first place.

Even as a leopard cannot change its spots, neither can we curtail our homosexual inclinations…. I’ll just try not to get caught.”

“I have been in the jungles 26 months. I was just wondering if they w ill ta ke us back to the States before the war is over.

This jungle life will wreck your nerves…. If t he people back home don’t t h in k t he jungle is hell just let them come over and stay for a few years.”

“Better food should be considered for men in combat. Constant diets of Vienna sausage & spam tends to decrease morale, as well as ruin a man’s stomach.”

LEFT: COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN SOLDIER IN WWII; RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

UPDATE

Wartime G.I. surveys drew complaintladen opinions about officers who “stink” and subpar grub (above), among others.

WORLD WAR II

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1/21/22 1:39 PM

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Shi Se

Through DNA, Australia’s “unknown sailor”—lost in the 1942 sinking of HMAS Sydney—has now been identified: Able Seaman Thomas Welsby Clark.

THE LIFE RAFT WASHED UP on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean on February 6, 1942, almost three months after a German merchant raider sank the light cruiser HMAS Sydney off the coast of Western Australia, more than a thousand miles away. Inside the Carley float were human remains, clad in blue Royal Australian Navy overalls. The body was believed to be the only one recovered from the Sydney, sunk on November 19, 1941, by the German cruiser Kormoran. For decades, however, the body went unidentified and became known as the Sydney’s legendary “unknown sailor.”

Australian military authorities collected bone and dental samples from the body in 2006. And 15 years later—after painstaking checks

WORD FOR WORD

“Victory at Kursk will be a beacon for the whole world.”

—Adolf Hitler, in a message to his generals, April 15, 1943. The biggest tank battle in history, Kursk ended in a decisive German defeat by the Soviets.

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against DNA taken from descendants of the hundreds of sailors lost on the Sydney—in November 2021 the Australian government identified the remains as those of Able Seaman Thomas Welsby Clark of Brisbane, who was 21 when he died. The DNA analysis linked his body to two surviving relatives. “That we can finally know Tom’s name, rank, service number, and hometown, 80 years after he disappeared, is truly remarkable,” said Andrew Gee, Australia’s minister of veterans’ affairs and defense personnel.

Disguised as a merchant ship, the Kormoran preyed on Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean, sinking 10 merchant ships and capturing another. The Sydney was returning to port in Fremantle, Australia, when it encountered the Kormoran in waters 125 miles west of Shark Bay, Western Australia. Asked to identify itself, the German ship claimed to be the Dutch steamer Straat Malakka. But the Sydney demanded the ship’s secret call sign— something German captain Theodor Detmers did not have.

Detmers hoisted the German f lag and opened fire. Both ships were destroyed in the ensuing battle. Torpedoes sank the Sydney, which lost all 645 crew members. The crew of the Kormoran abandoned ship before scuttling the raider; 318 of 399 crew members survived and spent the rest of the war as POWs.

TOP LEFT: AWM P08739.001; TOP RIGHT: AWM 007888; BOTTOM: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

AUSTRALIA NAMES ITS “UNKNOWN SAILOR”

WORLD WAR II

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EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD and headed to war, Joe Esquibel bought a small silver bracelet at Fort Bliss, Texas, where he’d gone through boot camp. On one side, he engraved his own signature; on the other, his girlfriend’s name: Lydia. Esquibel would serve under General George S. Patton, get a Purple Heart, survive the war, marry Lydia, move to Grand Junction, Colorado, and have four kids. But the bracelet didn’t make it.

After serving as a guard at a POW camp near Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia—now the Czech A bracelet lost by Republic—Esquibel was scheduled to American soldier Joe ship out to Germany in the spring of 1945 when he Esquibel (top) in 1945 noticed one of his bags was missing, presumably stolen. near Prague was found by journalist Petr He reported the loss but eventually forgot about it.

In October of 2021, a Czech journalist named Petr Švihovec (left) and returned in December. Švihovec, armed with a metal detector, went for a walk in the woods with a friend who said they might find something in the ruins of an old POW camp. Once there, the device beeped. Švihovec started digging and found a bracelet. He couldn’t read the writing on one side, but on the other side he saw: “Lydia.” After cleaning the bracelet and enlisting help from a Facebook group of treasure hunters, he could make a good guess at the last name on the other side of the bracelet: Esquibel. A Google search turned up an obituary for Lydia, who died in 2019—survived, it said, by her husband, Joe. A historian found a document signed by Joe, and the signatures matched. Švihovec shared his findings on Facebook. Eventually a Czech-born Grand Junction resident named Alena Busovska reached out to the Esquibel family. With some help from the U.S. embassy in Prague and the Marine Corps, the bracelet made its way to Grand Junction and Joe Esquibel, now 95. “My wife passed away about three years ago, and she never knew about this (bracelet),” he told the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. “For some reason, I never told her. We were together 70 years.”

DISPATCHES Greek divers discovered the wreck of an Italian submarine 335 feet deep in the Aegean Sea, 80 years after it was sunk in a rare submarine-on-submarine engagement. The Jantina went down on July 5, 1941, after being hit by two torpedoes fired by a British submarine, HMS Torbay. Only six of 48 crew members survived, swimming to the nearby island of Delos. The wreck was discovered in November by a team led

by Greek diver Kostas Thoctarides, who has now located and identified four sunken submarines.

18

TOP AND MIDDLE: COURTESY OF PETR PRAVOSLAV ŠVIHOVEC; BOTTOM: KOSTAS THOCTARIDES/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS

LUCKY IN LOVE— G.I.’S ROMANTIC KEEPSAKE RETURNED

WORLD WAR II

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1/21/22 1:38 PM

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1/27/22 9:46 AM

Japanese POWs of the Soviet Union are put to work building the Baikal-Amur railway in Siberia after the war.

ASK WWII

A : The Red Army captured nearly three million German

POWs during World War II. About one-third died in captivity during the war or shortly after. Most of the survivors were released by the end of 1946. Approximately 85,000—labeled “war criminals”—were held until 1950, subject to forced labor.

The harsh Soviet treatment of German prisoners, however, is eclipsed by Nazi Germany’s barbarous treatment of Soviet POWs. Approximately 3.3 million Soviet prisoners were systematically starved to death by the Germans from 1941-45.

Second only to Jews, Soviet POWs were the Nazis’ largest group of victims. Compared to these horrors—and Japan’s cruel treatment of Allied prisoners—Japanese POWs in the Soviet Union did not fare so badly.

On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The next day, the Red Army launched a massive invasion of Manchuria, quickly overwhelming the Japanese defenders. Sporadic fighting continued until August 30. Meanwhile, the Red Army pushed into Japaneseoccupied northern Korea and made amphibious landings on Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, making good Stalin’s aim to retake the territory Russia lost to Japan in 1905. That autumn approximately 600,000 Japanese Imperial Army troops were marched north into captivity, to toil in labor camps throughout the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. Two hundred thousand worked on the Baikal-Amur Mainline project, a railway to run parallel to, but well north of, the Trans-Siberian. Some 60,000–70,000 Japanese detainees died of disease, exposure, and hunger, most in the winter of 1945-46. Repatriation of Japanese POWs began in 1946, was mostly completed in 1947-48, and continued in dribs and drabs until 1956.

—Historian Stuart D. Goldman is the author of Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army’s Victory that Shaped World War II. SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 OR EMAIL: worldwar2@historynet.com

20

DISPATCHES Federal oceanographers may have found the wreck of the lost World War II tanker SS Bloody Marsh, one of hundreds of merchant ships sunk off America’s east coast.

In October, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration research ship Okeanos Explorer found a wreck off the South Carolina coast that showed signs of having been attacked. “Based on evidence surveyed, participating scientists are reasonably certain that it is SS Bloody Marsh,” NOAA said. On July 2, 1943, the tanker was attacked off South Carolina by the German submarine U-66. A torpedo hit the Bloody Marsh’s engine compartment and killed three men. A second broke the tanker in half—but the surviving crew members (above) abandoned ship and were later rescued.

Edward Shames, the last surviving officer from the “Band of Brothers,” died December 3 in Virginia Beach at age 99. Shames was a veteran of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne, which fought across Europe and was immortalized in the book and HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. A sergeant on D-Day, he was granted a battlefield commission for organizing his paratroopers after they landed five miles from their drop zone.

Shames, who was Jewish, helped liberate Dachau concentration camp. He later wrote: “The stench and horror of that place will live with me as long as I live.” He worked after the war for the National Security Administration and retired as a colonel in the Army Reserve.

TOP LEFT: THE ASAHI SHIMBUN VIA GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: LAMAR Q. BALL COLLECTION/GEORGIA ARCHIVES; INSET: U.S. ARMY

Q: Did the Soviets treat the Japanese POWs they captured as badly as they did German POWs, some of whom were kept in camps and gulags until the 1950s? —Knox Martin, Memphis, Tenn.

WORLD WAR II

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1/27/22 6:11 PM

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Sh Se

After the war’s end, First Lieutenant Robert O. Hogan presented future wife Rozalia Maria Szarka—here circa 1946—with a striking gift.

SCENT OF VICTORY Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries

22

My father met my mother in Germany after the war, when he was in the occupation force. The Nazis had taken her from her home in Hungary and forced her to work in a ball-bearing factory.

This bottle of French perfume was an early gift from him to her. I always thought the container was an odd choice for perfume: can you tell me more? —Bill Hogan, Falls Church, Va. French perfumer Marc Fael utilized an utterly unexpected vehicle for the packaging of his fine fragrance, “My Jerrycan.” Fael’s perfume, produced and sold in the immediate postwar years, married a glamorous fragrance with a very unglamorous piece of gear. The “Jerry can” was a German military canister (Wehrmacht-Einheitskanister) intended for one of the most precious and scarcest resources— fuel—but adapted later for many other purposes. The Allies reverse-engineered and adopted its stackable, leakproof design; ads for the perfume played on the motif, noting

Have a World War II artifact you can’t identify?

Write to Footlocker@historynet.com with the following: — Your connection to the object and what you know about it.

— The object’s dimensions, in inches.

— Several high-resolution digital photos taken close up and from varying angles.

— Pictures should be in color, and at least 300 dpi.

Unfortunately, we can’t respond to every query, nor can we appraise value.

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that the two-inch-tall container was “non-spillable for the purse.”

Your father may have stood in a long line for this delightful gift. After the liberation of Paris and into the postwar years, American forces were eager to experience the French capital.

One of the most sought-after souvenirs of the European Theater was a bottle of real French perfume. Often, one serviceman or woman on leave would be charged with bringing bottles back for others in their company or crew.

The National WWII Museum’s archives contain a letter written by Private First Class Herman Obermayer to his mother on June 15, 1945, that tells of an afternoon perfume excursion in Paris: “Almost every store is out of the famous name brands, but if they have a little there is always a long line, about 80% of which is made up of American soldiers. After going to a couple of stores probably would of decided that there were better ways to spend an afternoon than in perfume shops, but I met a WAC who insisted on dragging me to Coty, Chanel, Houghbigant [sic], Tabu, Guerlain, Arden, Patou, and about a dozen more whose names were longer, but who were also sorry that they had nothing to offer.”

In 1946, this fragrance cost $12.50—nearly $200 today. Factor in the extreme deprivation of war experienced by so many, and perfume seemed even more luxurious. It was the scent of an earlier time, a normal time, but with a trace of war remaining.

The container is a story unto itself, but your parents’ courtship and the circumstances of the gift add another dimension to this query—one worthy of researching and preserving—that left this reader wanting more. —Kim Guise, Senior Curator and Director for Curatorial Affairs

WORLD WAR II

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1/21/22 5:34 PM

BY JAMES HOLLAND

GEARING UP FOR WAR BACK IN 1868, a British company called J. Whitaker & Sons began producing an annual compendium of statistical information about the world; Whitaker’s Almanack has been published ever since, and none has proven more interesting to me than the 1939 edition. It turns out, for example, that despite our penchant for referring to the “Nazi war machine” when describing the Blitzkrieg years, Germany wasn’t all that mechanized. On the eve of war, there were 47 people in Germany for every motorized vehicle; that disparity was even greater in Italy: 104. By contrast, in Britain there were 14 people for every motorized vehicle, 8 in France, and just 3 in the United States.

This had all sorts of implications, for if a country is not very automotive, it has fewer factories, fewer workshops, fewer mechanics, fewer gas stations, and fewer people who know how to drive. Hitler couldn’t just click his fingers and magic more—which was why, when Germany invaded France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, only 16 of the 135 divisions involved were mechanized. The other 119 used what soldiers had been using before the advent of the internal combustion engine: horse, cart, and their own two feet.

Interestingly, though, Germany had more radios per household than any other country in the world, including the United States. The Nazis, very early on, realized that propaganda was vital. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, believed repetition was key—a tactic that could also be called “brainwashing.” The Nazis commandeered German media and developed new, cheaper radios. In Nazi Germany, personal radios were no longer big, beautifully made status symbols; they measured 9-by-9-by-4 inches and were made mostly of Bakelite, an early plastic. The Deutscher Kleinempfänger was as innovative as the iPod. For those who couldn’t afford one, the state ensured there were radios in bars, restaurants, and the stairwells of apartment blocks.

They broadcast not just Hitler’s speeches—there was, in fact, a wide range of programming— but the underlying message was the same: Jews were bad, as were Bolsheviks; Germans were the master race; Hitler was amazing; and so was the German military. It was a spin-doctoring operation that has

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ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD MIA

NEED TO KNOW

probably never been surpassed.

At the time, the German army was also realizing that small, two-way radios could be used for military purposes—in tanks, trucks, command vehicles, even motorcycles w ith sideca rs. A path for wa rd emerged: a panzer division not just stuffed full of tanks but organized as an all-arms mechanized unit that could operate swiftly and cohesively.

It was what had been missing during the years of trench warfare in the previous war: the ability for differing units to communicate efficiently and swiftly exploit evolving situations.

In contrast, General Maurice Gamelin, the commander in chief of all French forces, did not even have a single radio in his headquarters on the edge of Paris; nor did most anyone else in the French army. The result?

The army became completely dislocated, out of touch with its component parts, and unable to respond quickly enough to the unfolding battle, despite having more tanks, guns, and men, and a parity in airpower.

German concentration of force, and operational and tactical flexibility— the traditional distinguishing feature of the Prussian, then German, military—was able to triumph. And it was those 16 mechanized divisions that did most of the damage.

So, the German preponderance of radios was, arguably, the key factor in their early war successes. Yet the lack of mechanization was what did them in in the long term. Germany’s prewar shortfall could never be overcome, especially with the huge advantage Britain, and then the United States, held in that regard. It was why, for example, Germany produced only 8,553 Panzer IVs—its most numerous tank—while the United States built more than 49,000 Shermans. Radios allowed the Germans short but devastating gains, but ultimately they lacked the mechanization to win the war. If Germany and the Axis had been reading Whitaker in 1939, perhaps they would have realized their fatal shortcomings. H

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TODAY IN HISTORY JULY 17, 1918 TSAR NICHOLAS II OF RUSSIA AND HIS FAMILY WERE EXECUTED. YEARS LATER, CONSPIRACY THEORIES EMERGED, AND IMPOSTORS BEGAN TO SURFACE. AN EASTERN EUROPEAN WOMAN NAMED ANNA ANDERSON CLAIMED TO BE GRAND DUCHESS ANASTASIA ROMANOV, SPARED DEATH IN 1918 BY A SYMPATHETIC GUARD. TEN YEARS AFTER HER DEATH IN 1994, DNA TESTING CONCLUDED SHE WAS NOT ANASTASIA BUT A MISSING POLISH FACTORY WORKER. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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6/12/20 3:42 PM

TRAVEL PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND

BY BRENDAN SAINSBURY

D-DAY’S LAUNCHPAD

STANDING ON THE WATERFRONT IN PORTSMOUTH, with the choppy waters of the harbor sparkling like crumpled aluminum foil in front of me, it’s difficult to make sense of the scathing comments of previous visitors about the English seaside city. American novelist Henry James once labeled Portsmouth “dirty” and “dull.” Jane Austen claimed “its vile sea breezes” were “the ruin of beauty and health.” Current British prime minister Boris Johnson famously quipped it was “full of drugs, obesity, and underachievement.”

Yet while Portsmouth might lack the dreaming spires of Oxford or the cosmopolitan buzz of London, the city has played an epoch-defining role in global history. Its fabled dockyard was once home to the world’s greatest naval port. Here, in the 18th and 19th centuries, intrepid explorers and admirals sallied forth from the heavily fortified waterfront on their way to the empire’s distant shores. But Portsmouth’s biggest test came in 1944, when it took center stage as the operational nexus and launchpad for D-Day, the largest seaborne invasion in history.

In preparation for the landings, top Allied commanders, including Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bernard L. Montgomery, converted Portsmouth into their military headquarters. Pieces of Mulberry Harbors—portable piers later towed across the English Channel and reassembled in France—were secretly built at nearby Hayling Island and, starting on June 6 and continuing through the summer of 1944, over 170,000 troops and an estimated 43,000 tanks and military vehicles embarked for Normandy from the city’s wharves and quays.

Not coincidentally, World War II history is the reason I’m here today.

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Returning to my native UK from Canada for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, I’m keen to reconnect with the sights and sounds of the region I once called home. I grew up near Portsmouth in a small town in northwest Hampshire in the 1980s. My father—who passed away in the early weeks of the pandemic, aged 95— joined the Royal Air Force the day after D-Day. While he didn’t play any direct part in the Normandy landings, he and his generation were indelibly shaped by the tumultuous events of Operation Overlord and its aftermath. By visiting Portsmouth, I hope to get a better picture of what living through those uncertain times was really like.

It’s sunny and warm as I thread my way through the redeveloped shops and restaurants of Gunwharf Quays in a city craving for normalcy after the ravages of the pandemic.

The strict lockdowns of 2020-21 weren’t Portsmouth’s first containment. In 1943, during secret preparations for D-Day, the British military declared the city’s seafront a restricted zone. Rules were tightened in April 1944 when a 10-mile strip running along England’s entire south coast was closed off to visitors.

For several months, civilians outside the zone couldn’t enter, while those

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OPPOSITE: FINNBARR WEBSTER/GETTY IMAGES; TOP LEFT AND RIGHT: BRENDAN SAINSBURY; INSET: AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The port city of Portsmouth, England, its present-day skyline dominated by the Spinnaker Tower, was a crucial Allied planning and operational hub in the lead-up to D-Day.

OPPOSITE: FINNBARR WEBSTER/GETTY IMAGES; TOP LEFT AND RIGHT: BRENDAN SAINSBURY; INSET: AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

on the inside were forbidden from leaving.

By this point, Portsmouth had already endured numerThis is dummy copy please write ous air raids. The city was hit over 60 times between 1940 yes over pleased was seen being and 1944 by German bombers, destroying approximately ask therefore is to when best.

10 percent of homes and killing nearly 1,000 people.

Like many postwar British cities, the landscape that reemerged in the 1950s and ’60s was haphazard and not always pretty.

Recent building projects—many of them new to my eyes—have been more inspiring. The sail-shaped Spinnaker Tower, a 558-foot-tall observation spire on the harborfront, could have been shipped over from ultramodern Dubai. The Anglican cathedral, extended in the 1990s, is an encouraging example of how to successfully brighten up a dark 12th-century church without wrecking its historic integrity. I pay a brief visit to the cathedral’s hushed interior to admire the Thousands of troops departed Portsmouth D-Day memorial window installed in 1956 that depicts action scenes from for Normandy on June 6, 1944 (above).

Their service is honored in a window at Dunkirk and Normandy in vivid stained glass. Backlit by the morning sun, it Portsmouth Cathedral (top) and the fallen reflects bright kaleidoscopic patterns onto the surrounding walls and pillars. at the city’s war memorial (top left).

Ten minutes later, while navigating my way along the coast toward the grassy expanses of Southsea Common, I stumble upon the Royal Garrison Beyond the memorial lies PortsChurch, Portsmouth’s most poignant monument to the Blitz. During a 1941 firebombing raid, the building suffered extensive damage, losing the roof of its mouth’s biggest lure, the D-Day Story, nave. The roof was never replaced, but the adjacent chancel survived intact the only museum in the UK dedicated and today displays stained glass from the 1980s honoring wartime troops from to the Normandy landings. Inaugurated in 1984 but significantly upthe Royal Artillery and British Eighth Army.

Almost every town and village in the United Kingdom has a war memorial, graded in 2018, the museum’s most but I’ve rarely seen one as magnificent as the one in Portsmouth. Drawing me conspicuous sight—a giant landing like a guiding beacon across Southsea Common as I head south, I fixate on its craft called LCT 7074—was parked tall classical obelisk guarded by four lions and enclosed by low walls inscribed permanently outside the unassuming with the names of around 15,000 naval seamen lost at sea in World War II. redbricked façade in August 2020.

Bookended by two barrel-shaped pavilions and fronted by a well-manicured The vessel, which successfully delivlawn, it looks grand without being ostentatious. Aside from myself, the only ered nine tanks to Gold Beach during other visitors are two murmuring ladies who stroll sedately past the endless Operation Overlord, is the last surviving landing craft from D-Day. After names, searching perhaps for an uncle, a father, or a grandfather.

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mation boards along the waterside esplanade recall its wartime function. However, the real reason I’ve come here is to visit its sprawling Royal Navy Submarine Museum and digest the story of the X-Craft, D-Day’s forgotten heroes.

X-Craft were midget subENGLAND ma r ines w ith f ive-men crews designed in the early the war it enjoyed a less Portsmouth 1940s to infiltrate enemy illustrious second career NE L EN GL IS H CH AN ports, lay explosives, and as a floating nightclub in Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, chart coastlines undeLiverpool before being Sword tected by the Germans. In rescued and restored.

January 1944, the midget Inside, the museum is FRANCE sub X-20 got close enough to split into three sections— Omaha Beach to dispatch divers “Preparation,” “Battle,” and “Legacy.” Newsreel images, dramatic photos, who secretly swam ashore and collected and audio of soldiers who fought on the sand samples in—no kidding—condoms.

Four days before D-Day, X-20—along frontlines add emotion and individual testimony to the invasion’s well-known with another sub, X-23—left Hayling facts. As a modern-day observer, I find it Island to act as advance guides for the impossible not to be moved by these impending armada. For 96 hours, the men’s palpable sense of fear mixed with crews endured dangerous and cramped conditions to reconnoiter the Normandy bravery and heroism.

The surprise exhibit comes in the coast and lay guiding beacons. At one “Legacy” section, which is composed point, one of the subs got so close to almost entirely of the Overlord Embroi- Sword Beach the crew spied German dery, a 272-foot-long hand-stitched cloth troops playing an impromptu game of that illustrates the events of D-Day in soccer through the periscope.

While X-20 and X-23 were scrapped perfect detail. With its vivid pictorial storytelling, it draws obvious comparison after the war, one X-Craft has survived. with the Bayeux Tapestry, the 950-year- Hidden in the museum’s entrails is X-24, old embroidered cloth across the Chan- a sub that saw active wartime service nel in France made to commemorate along the coast of Norway in 1944. StickNorman king William the Conqueror’s ing my head momentarily inside its invasion of Britain in 1066 (D-Day in 52-square-foot interior is enough to reverse). The question is: will the D-Day induce a mild wave of claustrophobia.

Back on Portsmouth’s harborfront, as embroidery still be around in 950 years’ time for 31st-century visitors to peruse? the late summer sun illuminates a handAfter tea and scones in the museum some line of taverns that somehow mancafe and a quick reconnaissance of aged to survive the wartime bombs, I Southsea’s seafront, anchored by the take a last look at the cranes, masts, and South Parade Pier from where dozens of ferries of this great maritime city and ships set sail in 1944, I backtrack to the nurture a new appreciation for its wardockyard and hop on a four-minute ferry time heroics. While the battle for France might have been fought on the beaches ride to Gosport.

Located on the other side of Ports- of Normandy, victory would never have mouth harbor, Gosport is the former been possible without the steely, behindhome of HMS Dolphin, a Royal Navy sub- the-scenes efforts of my father’s generamarine base and shore establishment tion and their role in planning D-Day decommissioned in 1999. Several infor- from Britain’s south coast. H

28

WHEN YOU GO

Portsmouth Harbour station is an easy 90-minute journey from London on South Western Railway (southwesternrailway.com). The D-Day Story museum (theddaystory.com) and Royal Navy Submarine Museum (nmrn.org.uk)— across the harbor in Gosport—are both open daily.

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT The Duke of Buckingham (dukeofbuckingham.co.uk) offers inn-style accommodations a short walk from Gunwharf Quays. Rooms are small but cozy. The hotel also sports a traditional English pub. Abarbistro (abarbistro.co.uk), located close to the cathedral, serves interesting small fish plates and Sunday roast dinners.

The Sally Port Inn (thesallyport.co.uk) in Old Portsmouth is a historic pub with connections to World War II frogman and bomb disposal expert Lionel “Buster” Crabb, the supposed model for James Bond.

WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO Along with an X-Craft, the Royal Navy Submarine Museum is home to HMS Alliance, a decommissioned A-class sub laid down at the end of World War II. Also worth a visit is Portsmouth’s historic dockyard, where you can see the remains of King Henry VIII’s warship, the Mary Rose, and climb aboard HMS Victory, the flagship of British admiral Horatio Nelson. The aptly named Victory was crucial in defeating a combined French and Spanish fleet in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars.

PHOTO: GENI; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

The sole surviving X-Craft midget sub, X-24, is displayed at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport.

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ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF MEL BROOKS, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED. RIGHT: AVCO EMBASSY PICTURES/PHOTOFEST

A newly minted private in the U.S. Army, Mel Brooks strikes a MacArthuresque pose in Brooklyn’s Bridge Plaza neighborhood. Born Melvin Kaminsky, he’d already chosen “Brooks” as a stage name.

PRIVATE MEL, REPORTING FOR DUTY ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF MEL BROOKS, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED. RIGHT: AVCO EMBASSY PICTURES/PHOTOFEST

A legendary funnyman’s take on some not-so-funny business

By Mel Brooks

I

n early 1944 I was 17 years old, in my senior year at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, New York, and, after several summers spent working as a comic at Catskills resorts, knew that I wanted to go into show business. But Hitler had started a war.

One day a U.S. Army recruiting officer came around and said that if anybody in the class scored high enough on an aptitude test, they could join the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program, the ASTP Reserve. If you were accepted, you would graduate early from high school and be sent to a college paid for by the government. Then when you turned 18 and joined the army, you would be in a better position to choose your field of service. This sounded great to me. I knew I was destined to be drafted anyway. So I took the test. I think they really wanted everybody they could get. Some of the questions were not too difficult, like “2 + 2 = what?” Needless to say, I passed. I was sent to college at VMI, the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, for special training.

Life there was wonderful and terrible. The terrible part was getting up at 6 a.m. to shave, shower, and have breakfast. And having to make my own bed with hospital corners. The wonderful part was that the VMI cadets were so welcoming to us ASTP Reserve trainees.

They never resented our sharing the school with them. VMI was not just an academic college. Founded in 1839, it was known as “the West Point of the South.” In addition to my academic studies of electrical engineering and learning all about cosines, tangents, slide

This is dummy copy for here they used please whenever a desk jive best easy was desk as pointed zone desk now however plane row.

Brooks’s ability to find humor in unlikely places has served him well.

If you can reduce Hitler into “something laughable,” he said of his popular 1967 film, The Producers (above), “you win.”

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Having gone to VMI, basic training at Fort Sill wasn’t that difficult. You learn how to carry a rifle, how to drill with a rifle, and how to shoot a rifle. And we’d go on long marches—5, 10, occasionally 20 miles—with only 10-minute breaks. That was tough. Then there’d be the infiltration course, where they tested your skills and used live ammunition while you kept your head down and crawled on your elbows and your knees. That was scary.

The more reassuring part was that I was trained to be a radio operator. That was going

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rules, and such, they also trained you to be a cavalry officer. So I learned to ride a horse and wield a saber—something I had never seen any kid from Brooklyn do.

When I turned 18, I was officially in the army. They sent me to Fort Dix in New Jersey, which was an induction center. And even though I had spent a semester studying electrical engineering at VMI, the army in its great wisdom decided that I should be in the field artillery. They shipped me out to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center. When reduced to its initials, it spells FARTC. (Which somehow lingered in my subconscious and later made its way into a comedy scene in my film Blazing Saddles. Waste not, want not.)

Fort Sill is in the southwest corner of Oklahoma. It’s cold, it’s flat, and it’s windy. If you ever have a chance, don’t go there.

BOTTOM RIGHT: KIRN VINTAGE STOCK/CORBIS HISTORICAL/GETTY IMAGES

At age 17 in 1944, Brooks was a cadet at Virginia Military Institute (above).

By February 1945, he was posing for a photo with two Brooklyn buddies (top right, at right) before boarding a troopship bound for Europe. He found plenty of indignities in army life—including the lack of privacy that’s bugging this unidentified G.I. (bottom right).

U.S. AIR FORCE/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

BOTTOM RIGHT: KIRN VINTAGE STOCK/CORBIS HISTORICAL/GETTY IMAGES

to be my job when I went overseas with a field artillery unit.

THE REGULAR ARMY was an education.

A really rough education. I’d never gone to the toilet before with 16 other guys sitting next to me. I would go crazy waiting for the latrine to be free of people so I could rush in, do my stuff, and rush out. It took a lot of getting used to.

Sitting with 12 other guys having breakfast was another new experience. Everything was “Pass the butter! Pass the milk! Pass the sugar!

Pass the jam!” There was a strict code. When somebody said, “Pass the jam,” you weren’t allowed to stop the jam and put any on your own plate. That was called “shortcutting” and was not allowed. You had to pass the jam to the person who said “Pass the jam,” even though the jam looked good, and you wanted to take a little on the way. It was forbidden.

When we were on bivouac—a temporary campsite away from the barracks—we’d stand in the chow line with our mess kits. Mess kits were two small oval aluminum trays with indentations for food and an aluminum knife, fork, and spoon attached. You waited with your mess kit, and they’d throw some beef stew in one of the indentations. Then came the mashed potatoes, and even though there were other indentations for the mashed potatoes they always threw it right on top of the stew. Then—you won’t believe this—for dessert there were usually sliced peaches. Which of course, you expected they would put into one of the remaining empty places in the mess kit. But what did they do? They hurled it right on top of your potatoes and beef stew. They simply didn’t care. And we were starving so we gobbled it down. (For some reason, to this day I’m vaguely nostalgic for some sliced peaches on top of my beef bourguignon.)

After chow, you waited in line once again to clean your mess kit. First you swirled it around in a garbage can bubbling with hot soapy water. Then you moved it to the next garbage can of rinse water, still filled with the remnants of soap. And then the last garbage can with clear hot water. That did the job. It never occurred to me to ask my sergeants and officers: Why do we have to do all this stuff?

Isn’t there a better way? Couldn’t we have a little more time for reading a book we liked, or maybe taking a nap once in a while? And then I realized: That’s why the army likes 18-year-

Brooks also had a beef with how food was unceremoniously tossed onto mess kits in chow lines—as apparently do these airmen at their base in Libya.

olds. No questions asked. You do what you’re told.

When I finished basic training at Fort Sill, I was shipped back to Fort Dix for overseas assignment. I was lucky to get a weekend in New York so I could see my mom, my grandma, my aunts and uncles, and the few friends who were also in the service but hadn’t shipped out yet. I stuffed as much of my mom’s delicious food as possible down my gullet. She made me things I loved like matzo ball soup, potato pancakes, and stuffed cabbage—things I knew were hardly ever served on an army chow line.

AND THEN ONE NIGHT—I think it was around February 15 or 16, 1945—together with three or four hundred other guys, I boarded a troop transport at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the SS Sea Owl. I remember going down below to the third or fourth deck, and I was greeted with the sight of rows and rows of stacked metal bunks. Each row was six beds high. It looked like hundreds of bunks. Unfortunately, in my row I got the third one, which was right square in the middle of the stack with what looked like a 200-pound G.I. above me.

Things were fine until the ship got to the open sea. Nobody told me about the North Atlantic in February. Huge waves slammed us from side to side and then, like a corkscrew, moved us way up and plunged us way down. And I realized there was no way to stop it.

Soon the throwing up began. It quickly became a cacophony of puking that never stopped. I was strong and brave for about eight days, but then I could no longer take sleeping down in the incredible stench that permeated the lower deck. Not only were we weathering a stormy North Atlantic in late February, we were also zigzagging every few miles to avoid German U-boats.

It occurred to me that even though the sinkings of Allied ships were getting dramatically lower in early 1945, there was still the bad-luck APRIL 2022

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chance of a U-boat deciding to sink our troopship. So I decided to take my chances sleeping on the top deck. With $20, I bribed a merchant marine sailor to let me put my sleeping bag under a lifeboat, and he was nice enough to give me some all-weather tarps to cover me against the sea spray. It was rough up on deck, but so much better, both smell-wise and torpedo-wise, than sleeping down below.

Fortunately I only had to do it for two nights, for on the third night, there it was— the rugged coast of France. Soon we were moored at the port of Le Havre. But even though I was sent overseas as a radio operator in the field artillery, the army once again decided that I should be something else. This time it was a combat engineer. The army moved men to various units as needed; I was transferred with some of my shipmates to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion. We were put on long troop transport trucks and sent further inland in Normandy for combat engineer training. Small groups of men were deposited at different villages.

Eight men, including me, got off at a little

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Brooks mans a jeep in Europe. He was assigned to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion, charged with detecting land mines and clearing buildings of booby traps.

farmhouse with a sign on the entrance that said “Mon Repos.” It occurred to me that Mon Repos—“My Repose”—was a rather grandiose name for, maybe, the summer home of a retired nobleman. But it turned out to be just a country farmhouse. It was in the village of Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie. The village was near a larger town called Offranville, not far from the fairly big and busy port of Dieppe on the English Channel.

We were taught to safely unearth land mines. Some of them were big, and some of them were smaller. The big ones were called Teller mines. They carried a lot of explosives in them. You would have to probe the earth lightly with your bayonet and if you heard Tink! Tink! Tink! you knew there was something dangerous underneath. You had to be very careful. So you would clear away the dirt and then ask the help of the one guy in your platoon who was an expert at defusing mines—who really knew what and where all the wires were. He would take out a whisk broom and lightly dust away the earth surrounding the mine and proceed to disengage the fuse. I couldn’t really see exactly what he was doing, because we were a good 20 yards away hunkered down beneath our steel helmets. Lucky for me, our expert always defused them without a mistake.

Other land mines were trickier. They were set up with tripwires. Soldiers could be walking, hit the tripwire near them, and then you’d hear a click and an S-mine—a canister filled with all kinds of shrapnel nicknamed a “Bouncing Betty”—bounced up about chest high and, for a radius of 20 feet, destroyed anything around it. If you heard that click, you knew that the mine was in the air, and you hit the ground as quickly as you could and buried your face in the earth because it exploded in a conical manner. The closer you could get to the ground, the safer you were.

Running was not an option.

We were also taught to search and clear unoccupied houses of booby traps. What’s a booby trap? Well, for instance, if you were sitting on the john and pulled the chain behind you, sometimes instead of the flushing sound you might hear a loud explosion and find yourself flying through the air. Which would mean that a booby trap had been positioned in the water closet above the toilet. So before troops could occupy a domicile, we had to be sure it was cleared of booby traps.

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To this day, even though I’m not a soldier and I’m not in Germany and I’m not in a war, if I enter a toilet with a pull chain behind the commode, I have a tendency to stand on the bathroom seat and peer into the tank above to see if there is a booby trap—which hardly makes any sense in a restaurant in New York.

Needless to say, I never saw any, but I still breathe a sigh of relief every time I look in and just see water.

In addition to clearing mines, combat engineers were taught to build makeshift structures to span small rivers or creeks. They were called Bailey bridges. It’s like a giant erector set: the bridge is constructed on one side of a river or a creek, and then swung over the water and dropped down on the other side. They were light, practical, and strong enough to support the weight of 6x6 trucks or even a Grant or a Sherman tank.

When our training in Normandy was over, we boarded more 6x6 trucks and made our way through Belgium down to France’s Alsace-Lorraine region, on the German border. I was lucky to get through Belgium on my way to Germany a couple of months after the Battle of the Bulge. Had I been born six months earlier, I probably would have been

fighting in that and who knows what would have happened? Anyway, luck was with me, the Germans were finally in retreat, and life got a little better and a little safer.

We were stationed in the German city of Saarbrücken, right on the border w ith France. The 1104th Combat Battalion was attached to the Seventh Army. Our job was to use our combat engineer training in land mine and booby trap detection to clear the dwellings in newly captured territories. It

A sergeant instructs soldiers in England on the dangers of “Boomph Girls” (top): pinup photos with booby traps attached.

“One touch and there’s another dead soldier,” the wartime caption reads. Brooks stayed in a French farmhouse (above) during his training.

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“Is there anybody in this unit who can sing?

Dance? Tell a joke or play an instrument?” a lieutenant asked.

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was hard work, not to mention scary work, but we went over everything with a finetoothed comb.

One day I was out on patrol with my platoon and we found a case of German Mauser rifles near an old railway siding. They were beautiful sharpshooting rif les with bolt action. Sure enough, there was a box of ammunition right next to them. So we had a contest. There were these white ceramic insulation things up on the telephone poles, and any man who shot one down won a dollar from each of the others. I was pretty good at that, and I’d made about $21 when suddenly we got a strange call on our command car radio: “Get back to the base immediately!”

When we arrived back to our base there was a lot going on. Platoons of men were moving rapidly all over the place. My company commander told us that army communications had been severed. It seems that some telephone and telegraph wires had been destroyed. Uh-oh!

IT WAS THE BEGINNING of May 1945, and it looked like the war in Europe was rapidly coming to a close. My unit was then stationed in a German town called Baumholder, in the southwest part of Germany. We occupied a small German schoolhouse. There was a fellow soldier with me named Richard Goldman, who later became a well-known tax lawyer. He had been with me on the boat coming over, with me when we were transferred from the artillery to the combat engineers, and generally slogged through the mud by my side as we tried to stay alive during the war. Richard was very smart. A lot smarter than I was. Because on V-E Day, that glorious day that the war ended in Europe, he marched me down to the cellar of the schoolhouse and showed me some K rations and a bottle of wine that he had procured for us.

I said, “Dick, what’s this all about?”

He said, “Even though the shooting ended today, tomorrow is the official announcement of V-E Day. Everyone will go crazy. They will be joyously firing their weapons into the air. No one in that state of euphoria will realize that what goes up must come down, and the bullets will surely come raining down on what’s below. So that’s why we are going to spend the next 24 hours in this cellar, trading the joy of victory for the tired cliché of just staying alive.”

So thanks to the savvy thinking of Richard Goldman, I’m still here.

The war was over, but I didn’t go back to America immediately. We became part of the Army of Occupation. It was much safer, but kind of dull.

One day, a lieutenant from Special Services who was touring army installations in our area said, “Is there anybody in this unit who can sing? Dance? Tell a joke or play an instrument?”

I immediately raised my hand.

He said, “What can you do?”

AP PHOTO/TONY CAMERANO

After occupation duty, Brooks returned to the U.S. in April 1946 aboard the Queen Elizabeth—here berthing in New York.

I quickly realized that we were the destroyers. Those white ceramic insulators were the wrong things to make a target-practice game of. So knowing that we were really not in danger, I gallantly offered to take my men out again and search for the enemy snipers that had sabotaged the phone lines. My company commander gave me permission and sent us off with a salute that connoted something like, “You men are a brave bunch.” We never let on.

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I said, “All of the above! I can sing, dance, tell jokes, and play the drums.”

I told him all about what I had done from age 14 on in the Borscht Belt—an affectionate term for the area of the Catskill Mountains about 90 miles north of New York City replete with Jewish summer resorts—where I’d discovered I was a comedian. He asked my CO if he could borrow me for a few weeks. So I joined his Special Services unit and became one of the comics in a variety show touring different army camps. Needless to say, I was an exceptional addition to his staff. As a result, the lieutenant asked my CO if he could permanently transfer me to Special Services. Permission was granted, and I was an entertainer once again.

I reported to Special Services in Wiesbaden, Germany. I was made an acting corporal and put in charge of the entertainment at non-com and officers’ clubs. It was a great gig. I was busy putting together German civilian talent with American G.I.s who could sing, dance, and play instruments for variety shows that I would MC. I was almost disappointed when I was told my time in Europe was up and I would be going back to the USA. The journey back to America in April 1946 was a lot faster and safer than the journey to Europe. We were on the Queen Elizabeth, a beautiful boat and a big step up from the Sea Owl. It was seven or eight in the morning when we entered New York Harbor.

At the sight of the Statue of Liberty smiling down at us, many a G.I. broke into tears. I think I was one of them.

I was sent to Fort Dix for a month or two before processing my reentry into civilian life. I did some camp shows with Special Services while there. I exercised my songwriting skills by writing parodies. For instance, instead of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” we’d sing, “When we begin to clean the latrine.” And for “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” we rolled up our pants legs and became the Andrews Sisters.

I was discharged—honorably, I might add— in June 1946. Being a civilian once again was wonderful and terrible. I didn’t have to eat in a mess hall anymore; I could eat Chinese, Ital-

ian, or deli anytime I wanted to. But what to wear? In the army it was easy. You put on the same clothes every day. But I had actually grown about an inch and put on about 20 pounds while I was overseas, so I had to get a whole new wardrobe. My favorite wing-tipped black-and-white shoes were heartbreakingly too small to wear anymore. I had grown up.

The army didn’t rob me of my youth; it really gave me quite an education. If you don’t get killed in the army, you can learn a lot. You learn how to stand on your own two feet. H

Postwar, Brooks did some camp shows at Fort Dix before his discharge— memorialized (above) in the army newspaper Stars and Stripes. The question its headline asked has long since been definitively answered.

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THE ENGLAND GAME Despite ample red flags, dozens of British agents parachuted into Holland— directly into German hands

By Robert Hutton

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Agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) train in parachute jumping in 1941.

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Based in London’s Westminster area, the Special Operations Executive was dedicated to aiding anti-Nazi resistance.

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s Christmas approached in 1942, a young cryptographer named Leo Marks sat in an office on Baker Street in London, trying to understand what was bothering him. Marks worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the clandestine outfit Prime Minister Winston Churchill had ordered to “set Europe ablaze” with sabotage operations.

His job was to improve the security of communications with agents behind enemy lines who transmitted and received encrypted messages in Morse code via portable radio sets.

There were plenty of things to trouble the 22-year-old: he seemed to be on the point of being fired for insubordination, he couldn’t get a girlfriend, and his neighbors believed his lack of a uniform meant he was a coward. But it wasn’t any of those things that were on his mind. It was something about the messages SOE was getting from its agents in the Netherlands.

For a start, some weren’t using their security checks. Agents were given secret signals—often a deliberate spelling mistake—to include in a message to show that they weren’t “controlled”: that they hadn’t been captured and forced to transmit at gunpoint. Typically agents would be given two such checks: one they could confess to under torture and one they were supposed to keep secret. One Dutch agent had never used any of his checks; another had started out doing so and then stopped. That ought to have been a red flag, but when Marks asked the Dutch section’s controllers about it, he was told not to worry.

Part of the trouble was that all of SOE’s communications security was lax. Marks had been horrified, on joining earlier that year, at how easy the organization’s ciphers were to break. That made the main part of his job particularly important: ensuring that the agents spent as little time as possible on the air. Once an agent began transmitting, Nazis using direction-finding equipment would start hunting for the signal’s source. If caught, the agent faced torture and death. One cause of extra transmissions was when an agent made an encoding error, meaning that the message couldn’t be decoded at the other end. Until Marks arrived, SOE had tended to ask agents to send their message again. But Marks viewed that as an unnecessary risk. He set about teaching SOE’s signals staff how to work out where the agent had

OV ER IN HOLL A N D t hat Ch r istma s, another young man had no doubt at all that there was a problem with SOE’s operation.

His name was Johan Ubbink, a 21-yearold SOE radio operator, and he was in a German-controlled prison.

U bbink—codenamed “Chive” by SOE, which gave many of its Dutch operatives vegetable code names—had already had a lively war, starting out as a Dutch naval officer before making his way to England via Sweden, Russia, Iran, and India. In Britain, he’d been recruited as an agent, and at the end of November 1942 he and a fellow Dutchman had parachuted into the Netherlands on a mission to organize local resistance to the Nazi invaders into a “secret army” ready to support Allied plans to liberate the Continent.

On the ground, Ubbink and his companion had been met, as planned, by a local “reception committee” of six Dutchmen. They wanted him to hand over his pistol, as it would be impossible to explain if he were stopped by a German patrol. With some reluctance, Ubbink agreed. After an exchange of gossip, he was told it was time to set off for their hideout. “Then we were suddenly seized from behind,” he said later. The reception committee was in fact a group of Dutch policemen working for the Nazis.

When the Germans interrogated him, the experience was friendlier than Ubbink expected. He was given coffee and cigarettes.

At first, he refused to give more than his name, age, and place of birth. But his interrogator replied that they already knew everything, offering a detailed rundown of the sites where Ubbink had been trained, his instructors, and his fellow students. Every agent sent to Holland had been captured, the interrogator said. It was at this point that Ubbink cracked: what was the point of holding out against people who knew so much? Over the next few

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gone wrong and decode their messages so they didn’t have to retransmit.

Although, when Marks thought about it, this was one problem the Dutch agents didn’t have. Their messages were always perfectly encrypted. It would be several weeks before he realized the significance of that.

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days, deprived of sleep, he gave up most of what he knew, including his radio code.

Ubbink’s interrogator wasn’t bluffing when he said that the entire Dutch SOE operation was in Nazi hands. It had been for months. Hermann Giskes—a 46-year-old veteran of the Great War who had spent many of the years since in his family’s tobacco business—was the top operative in Holland for Germany’s military intelligence organization, the Abwehr. In late 1941 Giskes’s subordinates told him about an informant who had reported that the British were sending supplies to the Dutch resistance. He was initially skeptical: “Go to the North Pole with your stories,” he scoffed. But Giskes’s men persuaded him the source was right, and the ensuing operation—christened “North Pole”—saw them capture two SOE agents in March 1942, one of them a Dutch radio operator named Hubertus Lauwers.

Lauwers, a bespectacled 26-year-old who’d been working on a rubber plantation in Singapore before the war, had been in Holland for four months before then, signaling faithfully and using security checks, as he had been trained. Giskes told Lauwers that he could save his and his fellow agent’s life by acting as if nothing was wrong and transmitting messages to London drafted by the Abwehr. To the Dutchman’s alarm, Giskes asked him what security checks he used, but Lauwers managed to come up with a plausible lie. He went on air confident that SOE would see that the genuine checks were missing and treat his messages with appropriate suspicion.

This, unfortunately, was putting more faith in Lauwers’s British masters than they deserved. His signals, when they came in, were f lagged “ BLUFF CHECK OMITTED, TRUE CHECK OMITTED ”—both security checks missing—but this was ignored. It was one of the things Marks had questioned when he joined SOE a few months later, only to be told not to worry.

That directive wasn’t entirely unjustified: the radio signals at that range were faint, and it was possible that the messages had been SOE agents (in Greece, top) communicated with their handlers via encrypted messages sent on portable radio sets (right)—an act that put them at risk. The longer an agent was on the air, the more likely it was the Nazis could find the signal’s source.

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THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, UK

“VERBORGEN VERZET [HIDDEN RESISTANCE], AN ANTI-NAZI PROPAGANDA BOOKLET DISTRIBUTED IN NETHERLANDS” (2019). BULMASH FAMILY HOLOCAUST COLLECTION. 2019.2.267. HTTPS://DIGITAL.KENYON.EDU/BULMASH/1593.

“Hidden Resistance,” reads the cover of this anti-Nazi booklet printed in Britain and distributed in Holland. But recruiting Dutch agents proved problematic for the British and created a vulnerability in the SOE.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, UK

“VERBORGEN VERZET [HIDDEN RESISTANCE], AN ANTI-NAZI PROPAGANDA BOOKLET DISTRIBUTED IN NETHERLANDS” (2019). BULMASH FAMILY HOLOCAUST COLLECTION. 2019.2.267. HTTPS://DIGITAL.KENYON.EDU/BULMASH/1593.

mistranscribed. But the main reason Baker Street ignored the red flags was that the controllers chose to. While SOE’s French and Polish sections seemed to have plenty to report, the Dutch section had struggled to recruit agents and get them into the country.

It had only three active agents at the start of March 1942. It was preferable to believe they were all safe and starting to get results.

Errors compounded on errors. Eight more agents were sent into Holland in the next two months. One was so badly injured on landing that he took the cyanide pill every agent was supplied with. The Abwehr, working with the Gestapo, picked up the other seven after SOE sent Lauwers—then under German control— a message about how to get in touch with one of them. That left a single SOE agent at large, Georgius Dessing—codename “Carrot.” He went to a rendezvous with one of his colleagues, unaware that the man had already been captured and was accompanied by an undercover Nazi escort. Fortunately the contact managed to whisper the word “Gestapo” to Dessing in time for him to slip away. Dessing had been dropped without a radio operator; the meeting had been his chance to link up with one through SOE colleagues. With no way to contact London, he spent a few more months in Amsterdam, and then decided Holland was too hot and made for Switzerland.

After that, SOE dropped all its agents to what it believed were Dutch resistance reception committees. By the end of 1942 there had been 25 of them, including Ubbink, all arrested on landing.

The agents’ interrogators quickly found that the best way to break them was to tell them they had been betrayed by someone in London. Most believed this—something had, after all, obviously gone badly wrong—and many immediately started talking. Even those who, like Ubbink, tried to hold important details back ended up helping with future interrogations. Trivial facts—the style of mustache worn by a training officer, say, or the color of a door at another site—were still useful in persuading future prisoners that the Germans knew everything there was to know because they had someone on the inside.

It wasn’t just people that Giskes and his crew captured: there was equipment, including new types of communications apparatus, and substantial amounts of money. The Germans also learned the identities of suggested

contacts in the Netherlands, leading to round-ups of possible resistance and opposition figures. Trying to take credit for the successful operation, the Gestapo referred to it not by the Abwehr’s “North Pole” designation, but by a new name: “Das Englandspiel”— “The England Game.”

HUBERTUS LAUWERS continued sending signals the Abwehr had drafted for him.

Giskes had deliberately not replaced him: radio men had distinctive ways of tapping out Morse, and Giskes feared the British would notice if Lauwers were replaced and his style—his “fist”—changed suddenly.

Concerned that SOE apparently hadn’t detected the absence of his security checks, Lauwers tried other ways to warn them. He was supposed to close his messages “QRU ”— a common radio term meaning “I have nothing further”—but instead began sending “CAU.” And when he wanted to change frequency, he was supposed to send “ QSY,” but instead sent “ GHT ”— hoping someone in England would realize that he was spelling out “CAUGHT.” Allowed to send random letters at the beginning and end of his messages, he tried to include the phrase “ WORKED BY JERRY SI NC E M A RC H SI X ”—but t he Abwehr, perhaps fearing a move like this, forbade him from using vowels. In any case, London didn’t notice. The only people who spotted Lauwers’s attempts were his captors, who finally replaced him with a German who could imitate his fist. No one in Britain noticed the change.

It was early 1943 when Marks had a sudden insight into the troubling nature of the Dutch signals. Every other section’s agents made mistakes in coding, so why didn’t the Dutch?

There was no evidence from their training that they were especially skilled. He began investigating and discovered something else.

Alone of SOE’s agents, the Dutch never asked London to repeat a transmission because of interference. It was almost as though the Dutch agents were working with better equipment, and without the stress and fear of being caught that caused others to make mistakes.

And the reason for that could be that they had already been caught.

The SOE dropped all its agents to what it believed were Dutch resistance reception committees.

Dutch radio operator Hubertus Lauwers repeatedly tried to signal his British handlers that he’d been captured—but all his efforts were in vain. And while the British didn’t notice the warnings, the Germans did, and replaced him.

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ONE OF THOSE THREE was Pieter Dourlein, 24, a former policeman and sailor. “When in a normal mood, he is most reasonable, quiet, almost shy,” his SOE trainers reported.

“But when angered he seems to lose some of his self control.” It was in such a temper that he had, in 1941, killed a Dutch Nazi, which

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was the reason he’d fled to Britain, stealing a lifeboat to make the journey. Having lived in Holland under occupation and managed to make his escape, he was a strong recruit for SOE. His codename was “Sprout.”

Dourlein and his team had the same experience as the rest of the agents SOE had dropped into Holland: a friendly greeting—on this occasion with English cigarettes and a nip of whisky—a few questions about who they were supposed to meet next, and then a grab from behind and handcuffs.

The agents were taken to a converted seminary in Haaren, in the south of the country.

Dourlein was disappointed to find that most of his fellow prisoners had little interest in escaping. It seemed impossible and, in any case, a little pointless: SOE was apparently compromised, and their captors were treating them well and had promised they would not be killed so long as they cooperated. He tried to get a message back to SOE via some Dutch civilians in the prison who were in contact with MI6, but his warning became garbled as it was passed from contact to contact, and SOE didn’t know what to make of it when it arrived. This is an insufficient excuse: enough

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Marks was convinced—but a lack of mistakes was a thin basis for suggesting that an agent was compromised. His bosses were doubtful. Like their colleagues in the Dutch section, they had an incentive to believe everything was fine. They were engaged in a bureaucratic war with Britain’s intelligence agency, the Secret Intelligence Service— known as MI6. MI6 had resented SOE from the start, arguing that the Nazi crackdowns that had followed SOE’s sabotage operations put its own agents at risk. A disaster on the scale Marks was suggesting might see SOE closed down.

And so the SOE’s response to Marks’s warnings was to urge him to say nothing and to do nothing themselves. Meanwhile, agents continued to drop into Holland: eight more in February 1943 and another three in March.

© BRABANTS DAGBLAD/DPG MEDIA GROUP

Occupying Germans requisitioned a Catholic seminary in the Dutch town of Haaren and converted it into a prison.

It eventually held thousands of inmates, including captured SOE agents.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, UK (BOTH)

© BRABANTS DAGBLAD/DPG MEDIA GROUP

of the message was clear to alert SOE that parachutists, including Dourlein, had been arrested. And MI6 could have helped interpret the rest, had it wanted to. Instead, it delayed passing the warning on for two weeks.

It was the uncooperative approach of another section of the British military that saved SOE from sending still more agents into German hands. In May 1943, the Royal Air Force informed SOE it would no longer make transport runs over Holland. This was Giskes’s fault. He’d gotten into the habit of alerting the Luftwaffe whenever a drop was coming, with the understanding that the British planes would only be attacked on the return trip. The result was that Dutch runs were unusually dangerous for RAF pilots.

This, again, should have been a warning to SOE that something was wrong—but it was, again, ignored.

Over in Haaren, Dourlein didn’t believe the Nazi promises that he would be kept alive.

The prisoners could communicate with neighboring cells by tapping out Morse on their radiator pipes, and he discovered that Ubbink, in the cell next to him, was also interested in escape. They dug a tiny hole in the wall between them and began to whisper plans.

Above each of their cell doors was a barred window. SOE agents had received briefings on escape techniques before they set off—often from British prisoners of war who had escaped during World War I. One of the tips he remembered was that prison bars were often far enough apart to squeeze through. Using a piece of thread, he measured his, and reckoned he could do it. He and Ubbink cut up their bedsheets to make a rope—both men were sailors and knew their knots—and then waited for their moment. They chose a moonless Sunday at the end of August 1943.

That evening, the pair waited in their cells for the dinner trolley to come round. One of Dourlein’s cellmates begged him to call the escape off—“They’ll only shoot you”—but he was determined to go. Their cell door was flung open, and plates of food shoved in. When Dourlein heard the trolley turn the corner in the corridor outside their cell, he knocked on the wall, the signal to go. He stealthily opened the window above his cell door and stuck his head out between the bars. From the next cell, he could see Ubbink doing the same. It was the first time they had laid eyes on each other. The coast was clear, and they squeezed through

the bars and scurried to the end of the corridor, where they knew there was an empty cell.

There, they waited for the dinner trolley to return from its rounds and then crept along behind it to a bathroom used by the guards, where they planned to hide until midnight. For six hours they sat, occasionally speaking in whispers and hoping no guards noticed that one stall was permanently occupied. Outdoors there was a thunderstorm: good weather for a jailbreak.

As midnight approached, they opened the bathroom window.

Outside, a guard was plying his searchlight beam along the prison’s windows. They waited until it had passed them before looping their ropes around a bar on the window, squeezing out, and sliding to the ground. They were out of the building, but there was a barbed-wire fence around the compound. On their stomachs they crawled toward it. A patrolling guard passed them without noticing anything. Ubbink scaled the fence first and Dourlein followed, pulling his sleeves over his hands to protect against the sharp barbs. He got caught on them briefly but pulled himself free and dropped to the ground. They were out and sprinting for freedom.

Getting out of the prison was one thing. Getting out of the country was the next challenge. Their clothes were torn and covered in mud. The Germans would soon discover they were missing. They set out to make pursuit as confusing as possible by walking in loops, changing direction and making their way down the middle of ditches before they headed for a nearby town and threw themselves on the mercy of a Catholic priest. Their luck held: the priest passed them to sympathetic locals who hid them and worked out an escape plan. It was a slow, frustrating process, involving weeks of inactivity interrupted by nervewracking journeys between hiding places as they traveled through Belgium to Paris and then on south, but in late November 1943 they crossed the border into neutral Switzerland.

They reported immediately to the British

In Haaren, Pieter Dourlein (above) discovered that his cell adjoined Johan Ubbink’s (top) and that Ubbink was willing to join him in an escape attempt.

The move was highly risky—and successful, allowing them to pass along word of the compromised operation.

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messages to the agents in his hands had grown more cautious. He decided to go out with a flourish. On April 1, 1944, he transmitted the following unenciphered message to London:

Leo Marks, here in 1998 with a silk scarf marked in code (above), found no comfort in being right, and was long haunted by the many agents’ deaths. Conversely, the Abwehr’s top operative in Holland, Hermann Giskes (below), delighted in his success, and taunted the British to the end.

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military attaché: SOE’s Dutch networks were fatally compromised.

BY NOW, THERE WERE serious rumblings on Baker Street that something had gone wrong. MI6—which thanks to its own networks in the Netherlands had suspected problems for some time—had at last passed along a warning. Georgius Dessing had finally made it back to London and reported his experience. Combined with the other indicators, it was all too much to ignore. But there was still a reluctance to face facts. After Dourlein and Ubbink escaped, Hermann Giskes had an alert sent, ostensibly from another SOE agent, that the pair had been captured by the Gestapo and been turned. As a result, some in London clung to the hope that the two agents’ arrival in Switzerland might be part of a Nazi plan to destabilize SOE, and that the rest of the Dutch networks were solid. Even when the pair made it back to London the following year, they were treated with suspicion and kept under guard until after D-Day. But SOE could no longer avoid the truth. In January 1944, Winston Churchill was told by his chief military assistant, General Hastings Ismay, the “very disquieting” news that his secret army in Holland had “for many months been penetrated.”

Giskes, too, knew that the game was up. He had sensed from December 1943 that SOE’s

The joke wasn’t seen as very funny in London—but then it wasn’t meant to be. It was intended as a humiliation. It wasn’t just agents that SOE had lost; it had sent 355,500 guilders to Holland—roughly $130,000, or about $2 million in today’s money. But the human cost was far worse. Between November 1941 and May 1943, SOE had sent 53 agents into Holland. Fifty-one were caught by the Nazis. Of those—despite the promises that they would be protected—47 were killed, almost all by the SS. Leo Marks took little pleasure in having been proved right, and decades later still fizzed with anger at the waste of brave lives.

After the war he became a playwright and screenwriter—although his most lasting contribution to cinema may have come in the movie Carve Her Name with Pride, about SOE agent Violet Szabo, which featured a 1943 poem by Marks, “The Life That I Have,” that she used to encode her messages.

SOE’s failure in Holland was so total that for decades suspicion lingered in the Netherlands that it must have been deliberate, part of an elaborate deception operation. Surely, the argument went, the wizards of British intelligence couldn’t have been so comprehensively fooled. They must have been playing a double game. The destruction of many of the outfit’s records in a fire in London shortly after the war only stoked those rumors.

But files released since 1998 tell a simpler, sadder tale—of the fog of war, of wishful thinking, and of a refusal to see the truth until it was far too late. H

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We understand that you have been endeavouring for some time to do business in Holland without our assistance.

We regret this the more since we have acted for so long as your sole representatives in this country, to our mutual satisfaction. Nevertheless we can assure you that, should you be thinking of paying us a visit on the Continent on any extensive scale, we shall give your emissaries the same attention as we have hitherto, and a similarly warm welcome.

Hoping to see you.

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This is dummy copy for here they used please whenever a desk jive best easy was desk as pointed zone desk now however plane row. This is dummy copy for here they used please whenever a desk jive.

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A monument depicting the fall of the mythological figure Icarus and dedicated to the 47 agents lost in “The England Game” is unveiled in the Dutch city of The Hague in May 1980. “They jumped in death for our freedom,” an inscription reads.

The SOE had sent 53 agents into Holland; 51 were caught by the Nazis, and 47 killed.

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MEMORY FRAGMENTS Frank Douglass (above) was aboard the USS Kadashan Bay off Luzon on January 8, 1945, when a kamikaze pilot slammed his Nakajima Ki-43 into the escort carrier’s starboard side.

Three sailors were injured; none were killed. Douglass, who survived the war, kept the aircraft fragments at right and later donated them to the National Museum of the Pacific War.

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WE HAVE RETURNED Artifacts from the Philippines recall a fierce— yet often overlooked—fight against Japan

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ts defenders fought, fell, rallied, and resisted, all while subject to countless brutalities by the Japanese military. Yet the Philippines often gets “lost in the wider narrative of the war in the Pacific,” observes historian Reagan Grau, its story overshadowed by other island campaigns and battles.

Grau, the director of collections and exhibits at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas, aims to correct the balance. He is the curator of an upcoming exhibit—the first of its kind in the museum’s history—focused entirely on the Philippines’ role in World War II. On this and the following pages are some highlights from the display, which runs from May 20 through August 1 and is called World War II in the Philippines in 25 Objects. Together, the

items chronicle the islands’ clash against the Japanese and long struggle for liberation, while giving voice to figures ranging from American internees and Allied soldiers to Filipino guerrilla fighters and pilots.

Collectively, Grau hopes, the assortment will not just prompt military history buffs to return to this chapter of the war but also inspire them “to remember the suffering and sacrifices of not only the Filipinos, but also the Japanese and the Americans” who died battling in the archipelago. —Kirstin Fawcett

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WE HAVE RETURNED TOY STORY Elizabeth Irvine (opposite) was among the 7,300 foreign civilians in the Philippines sent to internment camps following the Japanese military’s invasion in December 1941.

Detained at Santo Tomas with her family, the American teen passed time by sewing stuffed animals— including these two dogs and a bear—from gingham and calico.

BLADE RUNNER Navy engineer Walter Autry received this kris from a Filipino guerrilla fighter on the island of Mindanao in exchange for a pair of dungarees. Traditionally both ceremonial and weapons of war, kris blades were ubiquitous fighting tools for the many native guerrillas—more than 260,000 fighters across 277 units— resisting the Japanese.

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PINT-SIZE POWERHOUSE Small and ill-equipped, the Philippine Army Air Corps was no match against the Japanese. Still, its squadrons received acclaim for their valiant defense of Luzon. Captain Jesús Villamor of the 6th Pursuit Squadron, who trained in Texas prewar, was credited with downing two Japanese planes in December 1941—a feat commemorated on a wartime bubble gum trading card.

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WE HAVE RETURNED WHERE SEA MEETS SKY Donald Arthur Blanford (left), a mechanic and TBF Avenger ball turret gunner, survived the sinking of escort carrier USS Gambier Bay during the October 1944 Battle off Samar—the Battle of Leyte’s most decisive showdown. His family later donated his aviator flight helmet and goggles to the museum.

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ONCE MORE INTO THE FRAY

LONG HAUL

America had trained Filipino troops to defend the islands prior to World War II. Yet Filipino expats weren’t able to enlist in the U.S. military until Congress revised the Selective Training and Service Act on December 20, 1941. Members of the resulting 1st Filipino Regiment wore this patch; its stars represent Luzon, Mindanao, and the Visayan Islands.

The Sixth U.S. Army—their symbol a six-point white star—fought their way through New Guinea and New Britain before invading Leyte in late 1944 and Luzon the following January. The Sixth, driving south and supported by several thousand Filipino guerrillas, secured Manila in March 1945 and remained in combat until Japan’s surrender.

PRICELESS PESO Warren Neely, a corporal with the U.S. Army Medical Corps, had spare change— and General Tomoyuki Yamashita, a spare moment—in Manila’s New Bilibid prison, where the infamous Japanese general awaited trial and punishment following Japan’s surrender. Neely, who worked in the prison, received the general’s autograph on a Philippine peso prior to Yamashita’s February 1946 execution.

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WE HAVE RETURNED TRAFFIC JAM As the Allies fought their way across the Philippines in late 1944, panicked civilians swarmed the roads to escape the carnage in their cities and towns. U.S. Army fliers (right) instructed refugees to stick to country routes or trails so as to not hinder oncoming troops.

WEAPON OF PEACE Look closely at the August 1945 photo of Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Corns (above left), pictured accepting the Japanese garrison’s surrender on the island of Jolo. At his hip and somewhat obscured by his holster, Corns—an officer with the segregated 368th Infantry Regiment, 93rd Infantry Division—is wearing this .45-caliber M1911A1 pistol.

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TARGET ACQUIRED This oil painting of Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo was once riddled with holes. It was discovered in Malacañang Palace, the former residence of President Manuel Quezon, during the 1945 Battle for Manila, and Filipino guerrillas jettisoned the frame and used the canvas for bayonet practice. Lieutenant Pop Lemon of the 61st Field Artillery Battalion rescued the portrait; conservators restored it in 1993.

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very day, scores of midshipmen walk down the 7th Wing corridor at the U.S. Naval Academy’s sprawling Bancroft Hall dormitory.

As they pass Room 7046, they might notice a plaque on the wall commemorating one of their own, Commander Howard Walter Gilmore, class of 1926. He was a World War II submariner, a Medal of Honor recipient, and the man responsible for one of the navy’s most memorable rallying cries. After his sub, the USS Growler, was severely damaged in a February 1943 collision with a Japanese ship, Gilmore, the lone man alive on the bridge, made the choice to save his ship and crew, knowing full well he would not survive.

“Take her down!” he shouted below. “Take her down!”

By then, Gilmore had been in combat for eight months and had repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to aggressively take risks to accomplish his goal of sinking enemy ships. He died in the prosecution of that goal. But he showed how successful taking risks could be in the fight against the enemy. In the early part of the war, not every sub captain “got it.”

By mid-June 1942 it became apparent to sub force commanders that men like Gilmore were rare commodities. There were too many submarine skippers who, having served their whole careers in peacetime, didn’t know how to fight a war.

These men, typically in their forties, had spent the interwar period at cushy billets like Pearl Harbor or Manila. When they went on exercises, their subs were assigned as units of the fleet, to be employed for advanced scouting. These skippers won their accolades for smart, synchronous maneuvering and fast, accurate flag signaling. Independence was frowned upon. And god forbid someone should take risks. So when war came on December 7, 1941, many risk-averse submarine commanders were unable to rise to the challenge.

As submarine service historian and former navy man Clay Blair Jr. noted in his book Silent Victory: “During the first year and a half of the war, dozens had to be relived for ‘lack of aggressiveness.’” Blair chalked it up to “overcaution” on the part of skippers whose prewar training emphasized “bringing the boat back” over offensive operations. To fill the slots, “brash devil-

Submarine commander Howard W. Gilmore (above) had a reputation as an aggressive hunter, but the act he’s best remembered for is depicted opposite, in a drawing by artist Fred Freeman, who served in the navy during the war.

ABOVE AND BEYOND When a gutsy sub commander had to make a tough call, he didn’t hesitate.

It was typical of his time in combat

By Steven Trent Smith

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Known as “Count Gil” at the U.S. Naval Academy, Gilmore started his career on surface ships before transitioning in 1931 to submarines.

AN ALABAMIAN BY BIRTH, Gilmore was raised in Meridian, Mississippi, where his father owned Gilmore Tailor & Shirt Shop, providing custom-made men’s clothing to residents of the small but growing city. After graduating from high school in 1920, Gilmore enlisted in the U.S. Navy, earning a yeoman’s rating. In 1922 he sought an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy through a tough examination the secretary of the navy gave annually to serving sailors. He succeeded and joined the class of 1926 that September.

At the Academy, Gilmore excelled in academics, but, unlike most of his fellow midshipmen, he shied away from athletics. His only brush with organized sports was a stint as manager of an intramural soccer team. His classmates, who ribbed him about his red hair and freckles, enjoyed his company—he always had fascinating stories to tell. As a sign of their esteem, they took to calling him “Count Gil.” That may have been because of his “unruffled disposition and complacent ways,”

recalled one. In June 1926 Gilmore graduated 34th in a class of 436. He joined the battleship USS Mississippi as a junior officer, where he spent four years in the gunnery department.

Surface ships were okay, but in 1931 Gilmore decided to shake up his career a bit and asked for a transfer to the submarine school at New London, Connecticut. He aced the sevenmonth course and, in July of that year, joined the USS S-48—at the time one of the most modern submarines in the fleet. After nine months at sea, the navy sent him back to Annapolis for postgraduate studies in ordnance; in his spare time he took up competitive shooting, winning distinction as an above-average marksman with both rifles and pistols. A stint at the Naval Gun Factory in Washington, D.C., followed, where he helped supervise the manufacture of cannon of various calibers. In October 1935, after two years of shore duty, Gilmore was rotated back to sea and subs, eventually becoming CO of his own sub—the old S-48—in April 1941.

The day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Gilmore was assigned to command the USS Growler, still under construction at Groton, Connecticut. Lieutenant Arnold F. Schade was named his executive officer. Their mission was to see the boat finished, put it into commission, hone a cohesive fighting crew, and take the sub to war. The 311-foot, 1,500ton Gato-class boat was the culmination of a decade of effort to ensure the navy had a

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may-care younger officers” were handed command. Their ranks included a veteran submariner, Howard Gilmore, then 39, who proved more than capable of throwing caution and precedent to the wind to show that assertive (but smart) tactics against the Japanese brought results.

modern, long-legged submarine capable of working independently in Pacific waters. It carried 24 torpedoes, had a top surface speed of 21 knots, and a range of 11,000 nautical miles.

Growler officially joined the navy in March 1942 and, on June 9, reached the submarine base at Pearl Harbor. Each day en route, Gilmore drilled his crew hard in diving, gunnery, and torpedo-firing exercises. After a week at Pearl, the boat departed for Midway, an atoll nearly 1,000 miles to the west. But when Commander Gilmore arrived at the navy base there on June 24, he found his mission had changed.

Instead of heading on to the Western Pacific—where all the action was said to be—Growler was redirected toward the Aleutian Islands, 2,500 miles to the north, to observe Japanese operations in the wake of enemy landings on Attu and Kiska earlier that month. The invasion had been meant to draw U.S. forces away from the Midway area and the great battle fought there the first week of June, but it also served

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

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The USS Growler conducts sea trials off Groton, Connecticut, on February 21, 1942. Gilmore had been named commander of the new Gato-class sub on December 8, 1941.

to rattle the fragile psyche of the American public by demonstrating that Japan had the ability to attack and occupy American soil.

On the morning of June 30, snow-covered Kiska Volcano came into view to lookouts on the Growler, rising above the mists surrounding the island. The sub spent the next few days patrolling the coastline, reporting ship and aircraft contacts back to headquarters at Pearl. On July 5 they spotted three Japanese warships anchored close together in Reynard Cove. The cove—about halfway up the mountainous east coast of Kiska—had been the site of one of the Japanese landings on June 7.

Gilmore identified the vessels as 2,000-ton destroyers. It was a perfect setup: like three ducks in a row.

He assessed the risks and decided to attack all three at once. It would be the first shot of his war and he wanted to make the most of it.

The captain rang “general quarters” and, at 5:55 a.m., fired four torpedoes. Two hit their targets amidships. Another exploded under the foremast of the third—a good start. But Gilmore hadn’t reckoned on an anchored destroyer shooting back. One of them fired two torpedoes from its deck tubes toward the American submarine. Running “hot, straight and normal,” they “swished down each side of Growler,” the skipper wrote in his report about the close call. A few feet closer on either side, and the sub would have been at the bottom of the bay. The incident thoroughly spooked the crew, who could hear the missiles zinging past the hull. Japanese planes and a patrol boat pressed home their attack on the sub, peppering the sea with bombs and depth charges, and knocking out Growler’s supersonic sonar and one of the periscopes. Gilmore headed for deep water and kept the sub under for five and a half hours until it was clear of the chaos.

Its basic mission completed, Growler headed back for Pearl, arriving on July 17, 1942. The commander of the navy’s submarine force in By early 1942, when this shot of the 4th Command Class at the submarine base at New London, Connecticut, was taken, Gilmore (top row, far left), at almost 40, was an old salt in the service.

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GROWLER’S SECOND war patrol proved even more fruitful than the first, though it got off to a slow start. Patrolling off Formosa (now Taiwan) in late August 1942, the boat made two attacks on enemy freighters in the

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the Pacific, Rear Admiral Robert H. English, opened his written assessment with considerable approval for Howard Gilmore’s performance: “The first war patrol of the GROWLER was extremely well conducted and the results were most gratifying. The attacks on the three destroyers merit the highest praise.” For the Aleutian action, Gilmore was awarded his first Navy Cross, the service’s second-highest honor. Clay Blair called him “a remarkable officer, who seemed to be without fear.”

first three days. Both failed, and Gilmore chastised himself for being overanxious and going after targets under marginal conditions. The strike on the second ship had led to a three-hour reprisal by Japanese antisubmarine forces.

Just before 5 a.m. on August 25, Growler was running submerged when the skipper ordered “up periscope” to take a quick look around. He was astonished to find that he had sailed into the midst of a flotilla of nearly 150 fishing boats, which were “near us for the next three hours.” Early that afternoon Rear Admiral Robert H. he spotted the Senyo Maru, a 3,000-ton English (left) was full freighter. It took four torpedoes to sink of praise for Gilmore’s first war patrols, calling the hapless merchantman. Then came them “well conducted” the usual furious counterattack from air and “aggressively and sea. The pressure on the crew was prosecuted”—their tremendous. One sailor had a panic deadly accuracy attack at his station and had to be sedated reflected on the sub’s with morphine. battle flag (bottom).

Six days later, on August 31, Gilmore sank the 5,800-ton freighter Eifuku Maru with two torpedoes. In the early hours of September 4, he unlimbered Growler’s 3-inch deck gun and gave his gun crew a chance to down a sampan that had been trailing the sub. It took them just six rounds. Later that same day he attacked the 10,000-ton Kashino. The captain identified the ship as a large tanker, but in fact it was a vessel specially designed to transport the massive 18.1-inch guns for the super-battleship Yamato from the gun factory to the shipyard at Kure. Each barrel was 70 feet long and weighed 145 tons. He expended four torpedoes on Kashino and was pleased when the big freighter sank in two minutes.

Growler’s final victory of the patrol came on September 7 with the sinking of a small freighter, Taika Maru. Gilmore headed to Midway on September 23, sailing into the sub base there with all 24 of his torpedoes expended. Admiral English poured more accolades upon the commander’s performance, writing that “all attacks were aggressively prosecuted.” The commander was awarded a second Navy Cross, in the form of a gold star. His combat record in the first eight months of the war put him in the ranks of what were at that time the submarine force’s most successful skippers.

On October 22, 1942, Growler departed Midway heading southwest.

Gilmore’s mission on this third war patrol was to scout what naval intelligence said was a busy enemy shipping lane along New Britain Island leading to the Japanese fortress at Rabaul. The U.S. Navy could read Japanese naval codes, including the primary one, “JN-25,” that told them precisely where a given convoy, or even a single ship, might be at a given day and time. It was not an infallible system: a communications snafu on November 17 sent Growler to the wrong location to intercept a convoy of cargo ships headed south, and Gilmore found nothing. Late on November 20 the navy sent another cable directing Growler to a spot near the northern end of the island to interdict three groups of enemy warships inbound for Rabaul. But he again found nothing, and lost another opportunity to attack.

On November 25 Growler made the patrol’s first real enemy contact.

Gilmore identified the ship as a destroyer. But it was moving too fast, so he abandoned his effort. The next day he spotted a big freighter at 16,000 yards and began preparing for an attack, but his target started zigzagging wildly, so he had to let it go once again. Time and again

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the sub was ready to pounce but the conditions never seemed propitious.

“Approaches were attempted on every vessel sighted. No attack possible,” he wrote. On December 4, the navy pulled the plug, and Growler was ordered to sail to its new home base at Brisbane, Australia. Thirty-one days on station and, despite the JN-25 decrypts, the boat had sighted just eight Japanese ships and returned with all 24 torpedoes unfired.

There would be no praise for this patrol.

THE SUB’S FOURTH PATROL began on New Year’s Day 1943 with orders to return to New Britain to again search for Japanese shipping.

On January 16 radar picked up a convoy of eight freighters with three escorts. It was just the sort of target Howard Gilmore relished.

He reckoned the risks were manageable, so at 8:45 a.m. he started his approach. Though the ships were making frequent course zigzags, just after 10 o’clock the enemy zigged directly into the path of Growler. The skipper fired two torpedoes that hit the 5,900-ton passenger and cargo ship Chifuku Maru. Down it went.

Watching through the periscope Gilmore spotted a destroyer just 400 yards out charging toward his submarine. “Dive! Dive!” he ordered as the klaxon rang throughout the boat. Depth charges from the destroyer rained down on Growler, some pretty close, but the skipper again managed to evade his attackers and continue the patrol. On January 30, just before 7 p.m., he fired four torpedoes at the 6,400-ton Toko Maru. One hit and blew off the vessel’s bow. After the desultory third patrol, things were looking up on the fourth.

An hour after midnight on Sunday, Febru-

The fourth patrol turned deadly—for the Growler.

It rammed a Japanese vessel, bending the submarine’s bow at a 90-degree angle (above), before the enemy peppered its conning tower with gunfire (top), killing two men on the bridge and wounding the captain.

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FOR THREE MONTHS, the “Silent Service” kept the story of Growler’s heroic skipper and his final order to itself. On May 7, 1943, the navy finally released an official communiqué that became front-page news across the United States. Details eventually reached chief of naval operations Admiral Ernest J. King, along with a request from the submarine force commanders that he bestow the nation’s highest honor upon Howard Walter Gilmore— the Medal of Honor. Gilmore would become the first submariner to receive the medal in

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (BOTH)

Gilmore’s last words, as he sought to save the sub and crew at the cost of his own life, inspired headlines, along with a song, a John Ford documentary, and several Hollywood films.

diving planes and forward torpedo tubes, and making a huge hole in the enemy boat’s side.

The sub rolled 50 degrees before slowly righting itself. The impact knocked everyone aboard the submarine to the deck and killed most of the boat’s electrical systems. Water poured in through numerous leaks—the pump room flooded to a depth of several feet. Things looked grim for Growler.

Multiple machine guns aboard the enemy ship began raking the conning tower, peppering the thin steel plate with .50-caliber bullets and striking all six men on the bridge, Gilmore included. “Clear the bridge!” the wounded captain shouted, ordering everyone to get below—but only three men made it. Two others, Ensign William W. Williams and Fireman Wilbert F. Kelley, had been killed outright in the fusillade, leaving the captain the only living soul topside. Below, Schade waited in vain for his skipper to appear at the bridge hatch. That’s when he heard Howard Gilmore give his immortal order: “Take her down!

Take her down!”

Schade hesitated for a full half-minute before turning to the yeoman and ordering him to “sound the diving alarm.” Growler slowly disappeared into the depths. Though watertight hatches protected the sub, several compartments rapidly flooded, making it difficult for the crew to maintain depth control.

Schade kept the boat submerged for an hour, then surfaced so the crew could search for the skipper, knowing in their hearts that they would not find him. They also checked out the damage. “The ship was just a total mess,” Schade recalled after the war. He fired off a radio message to HQ, explaining their situation and the loss of the captain and two other men. Brisbane responded with an order to terminate the patrol and have Growler get back to Australia as best it could.

ST. LOUIS STAR AND TIMES

ary 7, Growler was patrolling on the surface off the southwest coast of the Solomon Islands. At 1:10 a.m., radar picked up a blip at a range of 2,000 yards. Moments later, despite miserable visibility, the boat’s four lookouts spotted the ship on the horizon. Haze intermittently blocked their view, but they could tell that what appeared to be a small gunboat was moving away from the submarine. Commander Gilmore decided to give chase.

He immediately went into attack mode, made all tubes ready, and joined his men on the narrow, open-air bridge at the front of the conning tower.

Growler bore down on the target, slowly closing the gap. But through the dense haze, no one in his crew noticed that the enemy ship had apparently spotted the sub, reversed course, and was heading straight toward it at 15 knots. The adversaries were on a collision course, with the distance between them diminishing rapidly. The men operating the torpedo data computer in the conning tower—a sophisticated analog device that kept track of range, speed, and course—announced they had locked onto the target. Seconds later, executive officer Arnold Schade called up to the bridge: “We’re too close!” By that he meant that the exploders on the sub’s Mark XIV torpedoes required a run of at least 500 yards to arm and the converging ships were now closer than that. It was too late…too late for Howard Gilmore to avoid the inevitable. When he realized the hopelessness of his predicament, he ordered “left full rudder” and sounded the collision alarm.

At 1:35 a.m. Growler smashed into the port side of what turned out to be the Hayasaki, a combat support vessel, at 17 knots, bending 15 feet of its own bow back nearly 90 degrees to port, crumpling the first 35 feet of the hull, disabling the forward

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (BOTH)

ST. LOUIS STAR AND TIMES

Five months after Gilmore’s death, his widow passes her husband’s Medal of Honor to their son, Howard Jr. Other honors included a new sub tender (bottom), the USS Howard W. Gilmore, launched on September 16, 1943.

World War II—to be joined by six others over the course of the war. In a ceremony in New Orleans on July 13, 1943, Rear Admiral Andrew C. Bennett, commandant of the Eighth Naval District, placed the medal around the neck of Gilmore’s wife, Jeanne, as their children, Howard Jr. and Vernon Jeanne, looked on. That September, Jeanne sponsored the launch of a new submarine tender, the USS Howard W. Gilmore, which served with distinction in the Pacific Theater.

Growler had limped into the base at Brisbane on February 17 after a Herculean effort by the ship’s crew to restore it to a semblance of operability. The big question was whether the ship’s bow was repairable and whether it could be done in Australia. After surveying the damage, U.S. Navy engineers concluded that a new nose could be fabricated at Brisbane; the work was completed in early May, around the time Gilmore’s story went public. As a final, whimsical touch the Australians welded nickel-plated kangaroo cutouts to each side of the nose. On May 13, 1943, USS Growler, with Lieutenant Commander Arthur F. Schade as its captain, steamed out on its fifth war patrol. Schade remained with the sub through its eighth patrol.

Over the course of the war Growler racked up an impressive score of 15 Japanese ships sunk and 7 damaged. The boat’s luck finally ran out on November 8, 1944, during its 11th war patrol, when it was sunk by a Japanese destroyer southwest of Manila Bay. There were no survivors.

But Gilmore’s courageous order took on a life of its own, joining proud U.S. Navy slogans like “Don’t give up the ship,” “I have not yet begun to fight,” and “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Any midshipman pausing outside Bancroft Hall’s Room 7046 can read the words of Gilmore’s Medal of Honor citation: “For distinguished gallantry and valor above and beyond the call of duty.” In the armed forces of the United States, there is no higher calling. H APRIL 2022

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WEAPONS MANUAL THE SOVIET S-CLASS SUBMARINE ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

TOP CLASS

CLOSED-DOOR POLICY The very first S-class subs featured open-air bridges, but they were soon enclosed after complaints from ocean-sprayed crews.

RED-LETTER DAY If it’s an “S-class” sub, why was the conning tower labeled with a “C”? The “C” in Cyrillic transliterates into an “S” in the Roman alphabet—recall that “CCCP” was the Russian abbreviation for the Western “USSR.”

BIG SHOTS For surface combat, the S-class relied on a 100mm (3.9 in.) deck gun and a 45mm (1.77 in.) antiaircraft gun on the opposite side of the conning tower.

WHEN THE SOVIET UNION began to build up and modernize its military in the early 1930s, it turned to a once and future foe to help them develop a new submarine: Germany.

German weapons producers had successfully circumvented militarization restrictions in 1919’s Treaty of Versailles by opening foreign subsidiaries to do their bidding—so it was that a German company in the Netherlands developed plans for a sub that fit the Soviet requirements for a mediumsized, ocean-worthy vessel. In 1934 they delivered design specs to the Russians.

The Soviets produced the first of the new subs late the following year. In 1937, they redesignated the vessels as the “S-class,” the “S” standing for “medium,” though the West gave them the nickname “Stalinets”­—“followers of Stalin.” Fast and maneuverable, S-class subs served ably in all four Soviet naval fleets and performed better than any other Russian sub in World War II, sinking seven enemy warships and more than 82,000 tons of merchant vessels.

The only surviving S-class—the decorated C-56, shown here—sank four ships during the war and resides in Vladivostok, Russia, as a historical ship museum. —Larry Porges

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SOVIET S-CLASS SUBMARINE

Crew: 45 / Length: 255 ft. / Displacement: 925 tons surfaced; 1,157 tons submerged / Speed: 22 mph surfaced; 11 mph submerged / Range: 11,247 mi. / The Soviets credited one-third of its wartime tonnage sunk to the 56 S-class subs built.

THE COMPETITION AMERICAN GATO-CLASS SUB

Crew: 60 / Length: 311 ft. / Displacement: 1,525 tons surfaced; 2,424 tons submerged / Speed: 24 mph surfaced; 11 mph submerged / Range: 13,000 mi. / The U.S. built 77 Gato-class subs, its first massproduced sub of the war, from 1940-44.

GERMAN TYPE IXB U-B0AT

A Soviet S-class sub, C-51, enters the Russian port of Polyarny, near Murmansk. C-51 served with both the Soviet’s Pacific and Northern Fleets in the war.

Crew: 48 / Length: 251 ft. / Displacement: 1,158 tons surfaced; 1,298 tons submerged / Speed: 21 mph surfaced; 9 mph submerged / Range: 14,000 mi. / The German Type IX U-boat evolved from the same early ’30s prototype as the S-class.

SMOOTH OPERATOR The S-class’s full complement of 12 533mm (21 in.) torpedoes was fired through 4 forward (and 2 aft) tubes; the torpedo tubes were also used to launch naval mines. When idle, the tube doors closed to improve the vessel’s hydrodynamic profile.

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ARMED TO THE TEETH Sets of jagged teeth on the bow and top deck allowed the sub to cut through defensive harbor netting used to deter underwater attacks.

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MONEY TO BURN

American and Soviet occupation forces in a defeated Germany found themselves rolling in cash—legal and otherwise

By Don Smith

An oversupply of Allied Military Marks, or AMM (left)—introduced to fund the occupation of a devastated Germany after the war (right)—caused vexing financial problems for the United States.

I

n April 1944, the United States War Department was consumed with thoughts of France. Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, was only weeks away, and American and British war planners were enmeshed in the details of executing the world’s largest amphibious invasion. While Washington and London’s attentions were focused on Overlord, a little-noticed decision made elsewhere in the Pentagon set in motion a chain of events that led to one of the first major conflicts between the Americans and a primary wartime ally, the Soviet Union. The affair cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, embarrassed the Treasury and War Departments, and set the tone for the tense relationship ahead between the two burgeoning superpowers. What caused the problem? Money.

Occupation forces need money they can spend in the local economies, to buy goods and hire laborers. Frank A. Southard Jr., financial adviser for Allied Forces HQ in the Mediterranean, detailed in his 1946 book Finances of European Liberation the many repair and rebuilding APRIL 2022

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THE AMERICANS DIDN’T WANT to use dollars overseas, for several reasons. In Europe, the goal was to have Germany bear the costs of the occupation. If the Germans didn’t have access to any dollars, that made it easier to ensure they were paying occupation costs out of their own funds and national currencies. In addition, American officials were concerned that dollars paid out by the military overseas might end up back in the United States, which in high enough volume could spark inflation. Finally, and more ominously, the War Department feared that U.S. dollars spent in Germany might make their way into the hands of Nazis, who could then give that money to their operatives in the U.S. to fund espionage or sabotage operations. The Americans therefore wanted an occupation currency that could be used only within the occupied countries.

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U.S. ARMY

needs the Allies faced as they liberated or occupied countries: “In the Mediterranean Theater, for example, 1,500 miles of roads had to be reconstructed. One American base section in Italy expended over 11 million man-hours on road repair.” The Allies hired local businesses to produce all sorts of goods, such as “rolling-mill products, yeast, furniture, coal and coke, and spare parts,” wrote Southard, adding that “considerable quantities of fresh food, mainly fruits and vegetables, were purchased in local markets.” The local population also needs access to a cash supply for their own business and personal needs.

But what if there’s no local money, or not enough? Retreating enemy forces might destroy money supplies, as the Germans tried to do when they abandoned Sicily. Or the money printing facilities might have been razed in battle. In these cases, occupying forces had to bring their own currency with them.

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Illegal black markets sprung up throughout Berlin in 1945, where ordinary Germans sold goods to Allied soldiers with money on their hands.

Governments-in-exile of liberated countries like France, Belgium, and Holland didn’t want the U.S. to use dollars, either. It was the “strong desire of our allies to avoid the introduction into their economies of foreign currencies,” Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Areas John Hilldring told a Senate committee in 1947. If American dollars were in circulation, the exchange would likely favor the dollars and the local currencies would lose value.

So instead, even as the war raged on, the Americans printed billions of dollars’ worth of occupation currencies—German marks, Italian lire, Japanese yen, Czech kroner, and so on. The currencies were in the same denominations as the local money they would supplement, but had different markings. Marks printed for use in Germany were labeled “Alliierte Militärbehörde” (Allied Military Authority). The Americans eventually produced over 500 million notes of what came to be known as “Allied Military Marks,” or AMM. Their total face value was more than 15 billion marks.

In early 1944 the U.S. Treasury Department hired an American banknote printing company to create the engraved printing plates for AMM and had draft copies of the notes by February. The Americans, who were already planning to produce occupation currency in every theater of the war, took the lead and offered to print all the AMM that U.S., British, and Russian forces would need in occupied Germany.

The British agreed, but the Soviets balked.

Assistant Secretary Hilldring told the Senate committee that the Russians were worried that if the Americans printed all the Allied AMM, the Soviets might not have enough occupation money when they needed it. Hilldring paraphrased the Russian argument: “We agree to use your currency, but we cannot trust you to print it and to fly it halfway around the world to Moscow in time for us to get it to [Soviet general] Zhukov and his troops.” The Russians instead insisted on receiving copies of the printing plates; the Soviets would then print their own AMM. Assistant Secretary of War Howard Petersen testified to the same Senate committee that, in April 1944, the “Russian government sent a note to the United

U.S. ARMY

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States stating that if the plates were not delivered to the Russians, the Soviet government would be compelled to prepare independently military marks for Germany” which would have their “own pattern.”

The Americans and British opposed having two different sets of AMM circulating through postwar Germany and spent most of March 1944 trying to convince the Soviets to accept the American plan. They wanted Germany’s economy to rebound as quickly as possible, as a strong German economy would lessen the need for the Allies to spend huge sums to feed and sustain the defeated country. The main industrial area of Germany, the Ruhr, was in the northwest, which would be the British occupation zone. The major food-growing areas were in eastern Germany, the Soviet zone. In order for Germany to recover economically—and feed itself—Germans had to be able to trade across the whole country, not just within occupation zones. “The use of a different currency by each of the invading forces would have prejudiced the adoption of common economic and financial policies” for occupied Germany, testified the Treasury Department’s Andrew Overby before the Senate committee.

The Treasury Department asked the War Department for guidance. The War Department stated its concern that the Russian request for printing plates would become a source of major friction between the uneasy allies. An April 13, 1944, cable from the U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R., W. Averell Harriman, reaffirmed the Soviet intent to print their own distinct occupation currency if they didn’t receive the AMM printing plates. The British urged the Americans to give the Russians the plates. Even though Treasury knew that providing the AMM plates to the Russians might result in an unchecked flow of occupation cash into Germany, it soon acquiesced and on April 18 the Bureau of Engraving and Printing delivered a supply of plates, paper, and inks for AMM to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. The Americans had literally given the Russians a license to print money.

FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER, in July 1945, American occupation forces entered Berlin.

They found a devastated city, a shattered economy, a broken people—and a Soviet occupation force flush with cash. Many Soviet soldiers hadn’t been paid for months, even years.

When the Soviet occupation forces settled

into Berlin, the Red Army paid thousands of soldiers their back pay—but in AMM, not rubles. The Russians did not allow their servicemen to convert AMM back into rubles, so once the soldiers returned to Russia, their pay would be worthless.

Soviet soldiers began buying whatever nice things they could find in Berlin. “They went out buying bicycles, watches, jewelry, anything they could use themselves or send home,” said Colonel Frank Howley, the first head of American Military Government in Berlin. “What they didn’t buy, they stole— which was a lot.” Prices for luxuries—especially portable ones—skyrocketed. But there were only so many easy-to-carry consumer goods left in war-torn Berlin.

The Americans, on the other hand, had plenty of nice things. Wristwatches, cigarettes, goods from the PX—those appealed mightily to the average Russian soldier. Wristwatches especially. Russians saw wristwatches as a visible sign of “affluence and an established, even exalted position in life,” Howley explained. “Peasants never owned watches.” Howley said Russian soldiers would come up to Americans asking for “uhre, uhre” (German for “watches” or “clocks”) and that “some Russian soldiers wore half-a-dozen watches. A Mickey Mouse watch was worth more than a jewel-studded trinket from Cartier.” And the Russians had the money to pay.

That summer Berlin turned into one huge open-air market. “In the black market around the Brandenburg Gate, the Russians, Joes and

Well-stocked U.S. Army Post Exchanges in Germany provided a valuable supply of goods that G.I.s sold to their Soviet counterparts for fistfuls of AMM. The U.S. government was obligated to honor the AMM— blowing the occupation budget out of the water.

American wristwatches, cigarettes, and goods from the PX appealed mightily to the average Russian soldier.

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Tommies do a lively business,” wrote the Chicago Tribune Press Service in early August, while an AP story in September reported, “For more than two months Berlin has been the ‘watch capital’ of the world,” adding that “Red Army soldiers provided a seemingly insatiable market for U.S. timepieces, paying as much as $1,500 for a radium face trinket with a loud tick.” (A typical PX watch cost $20.) General Harry Vaughan visited Berlin that summer as President Truman’s military aide at the Potsdam Conference and later boasted he sold a $50 timepiece for $500.

American soldiers sold the Soviets goods from the PX, cigarettes, even parts of their military gear, which the Russians paid for in

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LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A Soviet soldier buys a wristwatch from a U.S. Army photographer (top). The Soviets coveted watches and prices skyrocketed— a Mickey Mouse watch (above) was described as “worth more than a jewelstudded trinket from Cartier.”

THE ARMY EXPECTED that overseas troops would draw some of their pay in local currency. This allowed U.S. soldiers to shop, go to restaurants and bars, and pay locals to do their laundry. The War and Treasury Departments never intended for overseas troops to have large amounts of foreign currency. Instead, American soldiers in Berlin were awash in AMM. Treasury’s Overby told the Senate committee why that was a problem for American taxpayers, who were ultimately responsible for paying for the AMM. If an American soldier in Berlin presented a stack of AMM for conversion into dollars, it was hard—often impossible—for the finance officer to determine what percentage of those AMM came from authorized pay, and what percentage came from black-market activity. So most often the finance officers simply exchanged the marks for U.S. dollars, especially early in the occupation before tighter controls were introduced. G.I.s used those dollars to wire money home or buy war bonds or other savings instruments.

G.I.s with suspiciously large stacks of AMM figured out other ways to turn their black-market cash into dollars. They bought small, expensive items such as jewelry that were easy to carry (and resell) stateside from Berliners or in the PX—which, like other soldier support services, allowed G.I.s to pay in AMM. Likewise, they went to military post offices, bought sheets of postage stamps, and sent them home. Relatives would then return the sheets to stateside post offices for cash refunds.

G.I.s also used AMM to pay Western Union and the Radio Corporation of America for wired messages and telephone calls home.

In addition to converting soldiers’ pay into dollars, U.S. Army finance offices were also obligated to exchange into dollars the AMM the PX received from all authorized patrons, such as Red Cross workers, army civilians, and displaced persons who’d been hired to guard American facilities. Civilian companies that the army authorized to do business with G.I.s in Germany, like Western Union and RCA, also asked the army to redeem its occupation currency. The result: a huge amount of AMM, much of it undoubtedly produced by Russian plates, was exchanged for real U.S. dollars.

The Pentagon asked the United States Forces European Theater, the army’s first postwar command in Europe, to implement currency controls. But many army commanders in Europe balked. In the summer of 1945, the army’s attention in Europe was on transferring

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AMM. “Marks are accumulating by the thousands in the pockets of GIs,” wrote the AP in September. “It is nothing for a jeep driver or clerk to flash a bankroll which, if it were greenbacks, would be worth from $5,000 to $15,000.” AMM had a conversion rate of 10 to the U.S. dollar.

And, critically, unlike their Russian counterparts, American troops could convert AMM back into dollars. The scenario the Americans feared in 1944 was coming to pass.

Above: President Harry S. Truman’s aide, General Harry Vaughan, boasted he sold his $50 watch in Berlin for $500.

Right: Lieutenant General Lucian Truscott defended the G.I.s during 1947 Senate hearings on the AMM affair.

LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

FROM TOP: FRED RAMAGE/KEYSTONE FEATURES/GETTY IMAGES; RICHARD LEVINE/ALAMY

thousands of troops to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. In autumn, the army focused on demobilization and redeployment, and enthusiasm for currency exchange control was limited. Units in Europe constantly reorganized as experienced troops were sent home. That left lots of inexperienced leaders at the lower command levels—the levels where most currency exchange occurred.

By the fall of 1945, the American media picked up the story. “American soldiers sent home more money in August than they drew from the pay window,” said the AP in September, noting that “figures published today from the Berlin district finance office showed that $3,044,224 was paid to occupation troops, who then invested $3,153,517 in money orders, personal transfer accounts, war bonds and soldiers’ deposits.”

Washington knew it was on the hook to pay for all those Russianprinted AMM that U.S. soldiers had redeemed.

IN JUNE 1947, the Senate held hearings on the AMM affair—where Overby and other U.S. officials gave their testimony. By then, though, the army had solved the problem. In 1946 it switched to military payment certificates, or “scrip,” to pay the troops in Germany. Scrip was accepted only at authorized outlets, like the PX—greatly limiting the G.I.s’ ability to use their pay for black-market activities—plus the military began to strictly regulate the ability of U.S. personnel to convert local and occupation currencies into dollars. But the damage had been done. By June 1947, the bill had arrived. The cost to American taxpayers to cover the redeemed AMM was $250 million more than what Washington had budgeted for occupation money in Germany—approximately $3 billion in today’s money. No wonder the Senate was mad.

But many commanders and troops, especially those who served in combat, felt they’d earned the right to benefit in some small way from their wartime experiences. Those troops, and their families and friends, were also voters. Lieutenant General Lucian Truscott, who commanded the Fifth and Fifteenth Armies in Italy, and replaced George S. Patton as commander of the Third Army in Ger-

many, spoke for millions of G.I.s when he argued to the Senate committee: The [American] soldier could see no reason why he should not sell personal items which he had purchased, or which had been sent to him from home, if he so desired.... Letters from home, newspapers and radios informed him that many at home who had not suffered his hardships were making profits from the war, as he felt, at his expense. He could see no reason why he should not make a small profit now when he had, for the first time, a small opportunity to do so.

Many Americans still feared—along with Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, who chaired the committee that investigated the AMM affair—that, as he put it, “a large sum of their tax dollars” had been used to “furnish a free ride to the Russians via printing press money of our own devising.” Understandable.

But, in the spring of 1944, Washington had had much bigger problems to worry about, including appeasing their contentious ally to the east. Thus, the Allied Military Marks episode ended up as one of the many unfortunate but unavoidable side effects that happen when governments conduct huge operations, like a world war. The American taxpayer did end up furnishing a “free ride,” as Senator Bridges had feared—but to American G.I.s, not Russians. H APRIL 2022

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REVIEWS BOOKS

AGAINST ALL ODDS A True Story of Ultimate Courage and Survival in World War II

By Alex Kershaw.

368 pp. Dutton Caliber, 2022. $30.

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“YOU’R E GOING TO MEET the ‘Boche’ !

Carve your name in his face,” Major General Lucian Truscott instructed the men of the 3rd Infantry Division on July 4, 1943, less than a week before they came ashore to face German soldiers on Sicily as part of Operation Husky. This statement set the tone for the next two backbreaking—and heartbreaking— years, which Alex Kershaw describes in riveting detail in his latest book, Against All Odds.

Kershaw, the bestselling author of works such as The First Wave (2019) and The Liberator (2012), follows the 3rd from November 1942 through May 1945, from its first steps in North Africa to its journey through Italy and France and into Germany, and, finally, to Allied victory. Specifically, he follows four inexperienced young men—Maurice Britt, Keith Ware, Audie Murphy, and Michael Daly—and their transformation into soldiers and decorated heroes. Each received the Medal of Honor and at least one Silver Star and one Bronze Star, along with multiple Purple Hearts. Together, this group from the 3rd Infantry Division bore the distinction of being among America’s most decorated infantry soldiers in World War II.

Their Medal of Honor actions involved hand-to-hand combat, sizable German casualties, and many American lives saved. Britt’s Med a l of Honor act ion occ u r red nea r Mignano, Italy, in November 1943, where he singlehandedly took out a German strongpoint, rescued captured Americans, and halted a German counterattack. Ware, in December 1944, neutralized a series of four German gun positions near Sigolsheim, France, while deliberately drawing enemy fire for two hours. Murphy, who was just a teenager in January 1945, held off an entire German company by himself in France, then led a counterattack despite being wounded and out of ammunition. And in sniper-infested Nuremberg, Germany, in April 1945, Daly took on the enemy in four firefights without backup and also destroyed three machinegun emplacements.

Like most true heroes, each MOH soldier was unassuming about his own valor. From a postwar press clipping mined from Britt’s archival papers at the University of Arkansas, Kershaw quotes Britt, an alum of the school, as saying, “We lost some good men who deserved the Medal of Honor more than I did.

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HEROES’ JOURNEY

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A U.S. Army mortar crew readies their weapons against the Germans near the town of Massa, Italy, in November 1944.

The army does its best to award medals justly, but obviously, in the confusion of battle, it is impossible to weigh the merits of individual soldiers. How can you measure bravery?”

Among a group so decorated, mention of medals cannot be avoided. However, Against All Odds is to be recommended more for its deeply personal, groundlevel portrayal of the life and times of infantry soldiers in the European Theater, recreated from news articles, memoirs, unpublished archival sources, and personal interviews. Thanks to Kershaw, we are there in Sicily in July 1943 when a peer asks Murphy about having killed two Germans who were escaping from a battle at Campobello. “That’s our job, isn’t it?” Murphy replies. “They would have killed us if they’d had a chance. That’s their job. Or have I been wrongly informed?”

So a man becomes a soldier.

Kershaw describes the sharp exhilaration of combat, and the dull exhaustion between battles. He brings us along from impossibly long hikes in Sicily’s debilitating heat, through the pitch-black winter nights when “men couldn’t see their hands,” and into the shivering cold of France’s Vosges Mountains, where “rockhard frozen foxholes” were referred to as “ice-boxes.”

As the men come home to America— Britt in February 1944 after suffering wounds at Anzio, Daly and Murphy in the summer of 1945, and Ware in 1947 after occupation duty in Germany—we watch as Britt and Daly embark on business careers; Britt goes on to serve as Arkansas’ lieutenant governor. Audie Murphy transforms into a movie star, appearing in four dozen films. Keith Ware becomes a major general and ultimately the only U.S. Army general officer killed in action in Vietnam.

In summarizing these men’s lasting impact, Kershaw quotes the great war correspondent and cartoonist Bill Mauldin.

After Murphy’s death at age 45 in a 1971 plane crash, Mauldin’s words in a Life magazine obituary could have been an epitaph for any of these men: “In him we all recognized the straight, raw stuff, uncut and fiery as the day it left the still. Nobody wanted to be in his shoes, but nobody wanted to be unlike him, either.” —Bill Yenne is the author of several books about World War II and is a regular contributor to this magazine. His most recent book is America’s Few (2022), about U.S. Marine aces in the South Pacific.

REVIEWS BOOKS

A HOLLYWOOD MOMENT WHEN AMERICA MARCHED OFF TO WAR following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, so did Hollywood. Actors, directors, screenwriters, and movie moguls did their part by producing morale-boosting movies and documentaries, entertaining troops, selling war bonds, and even serving in combat roles. Hollywood Victory: The Movies, Stars, and Stories of World War II by journalist Christian Blauvelt chronicles the industry-wide effort to support the nation’s fight against Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Thoroughly researched with material from nearly 80 books and other sources, as well as richly visualized with hundreds of archival photos, Hollywood Victory describes how stars like Jimmy Stewart, Robert Montgomery, and Henry Fonda set down their scripts and volunteered to defend the nation. Stewart, an Army Air Forces pilot and squadron commander, flew B-24 Liberators on 20 bombing missions over Europe, while Montgomery drove ambulances for the American Field Service in France and later joined the navy, serving on a destroyer supporting troops at Omaha Beach on D-Day. Fonda, who enlisted in the navy as well, survived a kamikaze attack off Okinawa aboard HOLLYWOOD VICTORY the USS Curtis.

The Movies, Stars, and Prominent directors also joined the fray: Stories of World War II John Ford was wounded by shrapnel while By Christian Blauvelt. filming actual battle for his 1942 Oscar- 228 pp. Running Press, winning documentary short, The Battle of 2021, $30.

Midway. Though his contemporary Frank Capra remained stateside for most of the war, he won an Academy Award in 1942 for the first installment of Why We Fight, a documentary series that detailed how the United States was drawn into World War II and why it was important to continue in its bloody struggle.

Blauvelt devotes significant space to industry giants, but his book also includes a wealth of fascinating trivia of how more obscure Hollywood figures joined the cause. Philip Ahn, the actor son of Korean independence activist Ahn Changho, willingly played so many Japanese bad guys onscreen in films like Back to Bataan (1945) and Across the Pacific (1942) that he received death threats. Meanwhile Conrad Veidt, who portrayed Major Heinrich Strasser in 1943’s Casablanca, fled Germany in 1933 with his Jewish wife and was so staunchly anti-Nazi that he had it written into his contracts that he would play Nazi parts only if they were “foul, snarling villains,” according to Blauvelt.

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REVIEWS BOOKS

RISING POWER A WAR OF EMPIRES Japan, India, Burma & Britain: 1941-45

By Robert Lyman.

560 pp. Osprey, 2021. $35.

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A COV ER BLU R B by historia n Ja mes Holland declares Robert Lyman’s A War of Empires, focusing on World War II in Burma, to be a “superb book.” I respectfully disagree; “superb” does not do it enough justice.

Japan’s seizure of Burma (today Myanmar) between December 1941 and May 1942, followed by protracted Allied efforts to retake it, is considered by many historians to be one of the most obscure of all World War II battlefronts. Even during the war, the British Fourteenth Army—comprising units from Britain, India, and Africa—was known in Great Britain as the “Forgotten Army” compared with British armies fighting in North Africa and Europe. Yet in contradiction with its historical footprint, the Burma campaign has garnered a postwar library of singularly high standards, replete with histories by notable military scholars and powerful memoirs by former army officers. To rank Lyman’s book as the best of the lot, which I believe it is, is an exceedingly high accolade.

Lyman touches on all the elements that made fighting in Burma among the most

physically tormenting, savagely primal, yet ultimately consequential in the war. Its battlefields amalgamated deadly diseases, wretched terrain, and superheated soaking weather.

Malaria, dysentery, and skin diseases could render whole armies ineffective. And not only did Burma provide a gigantic battlefront by European standards (16,000 square miles), but its jungles, thick with mountains and cloven by watercourses, radically contracted the ability of units from platoons and divisions to conduct coordinated defense or advance. Burma illuminated the Japanese Imperial Army’s formidable strengths, including the hardihood and valor of its soldiers, yet also its striking logistical weaknesses.

The war in Burma also yielded major consequences for the Indian Army. Since its inception in the 19th century, the Indian Army included Indian soldiers as enlisted men, but not as officers. In the early 20th century, a very limited program began to commission Indian officers, but still rigidly barred them from commanding British soldiers or officers. This changed with figures like Field Marshals Sir Claude Auchinleck and Sir William Slim, who not only commissioned huge numbers of Indian officers but also authorized them to head units, regardless of the race of those under command. As leaders, Auchinleck and Slim also transformed the army’s tactical proficiency, logistics, and health—in turn producing a modern Indian Army that rose phoenix-like from over two years of serial humiliations at the hands of the Japanese. Lyman rightly emphasizes that the Indian Army provided the “essence” of what would become modern India—today the world’s second-most populous nation.

Lyman’s narrative is brisk yet clear, filled with measured insights from strategic to tactical. While the book lacks a bibliography and includes sparse notes, the depth of the research is clear to those familiar with the archives. Its story is also replete with memorably presented characters, its greatest hero rightly being Field Marshal William Slim— today often deemed the war’s greatest British general for doing more with less in an extremely daunting physical environment than even Field Marshal Bernard Montgom-

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A British soldier from the Fourteenth Army surveys the damaged city of Mandalay, Burma, in March 1945 following an Allied airstrike.

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ery in North Africa and Europe.

Ly ma n a lso d rops i mpor t a nt observations about the leadership, vision, and sometimes even sanity of top figures in Burma such as Britain’s Lord Louis Mountbatten and General Orde Wingate, and Japan’s General Renya Mutaguchi.

Overall, A War of Empires is a highly readable yet sophisticated work about campaigns that never looked more consequential than they do today. —Richard B. Frank is an internationally recognized authority on the Asia-Pacific War. The first volume of his trilogy on the war, Tower of Skulls, was published in March 2020. ( Hollywood, cont. from page 73) careers to the war effort: Carole Lombard, often considered the first female American casualty of World War II, was killed when her plane crashed in Nevada in January 1942 after the actress had just sold $2 million worth of war bonds at a rally in Indiana. (Her husband Clark Gable was so overcome with grief that he enlisted in the Army Air Forces at age 41 and volunteered to f ly missions on B-17 Flying Fortresses as a .50-caliber machine gunner.) English actor Leslie Howard, who starred as Ashley Wilkes in 1939’s Gone with the Wind, went on to direct antiNazi films in Britain; he died in 1943 when German fighters shot down his commercial flight just off the Spanish coast.

Thoroughly enjoyable for history and film buffs alike, Hollywood Victory includes many more behindthe-scenes stories and photos of those in Tinseltown who went to war or otherwise supported those in combat. Whether taking up arms or using their talent and influence as weapons, their service helped the United States through one of its darkest moments. —David Kindy is a journalist, freelance history writer, and book reviewer who lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

REVIEWS GAMES

TOTAL PACKAGE SOLDIERS IN POSTMEN’S UNIFORMS

Dan Verssen Games. $69.99. Available at dvg.com.

WORLD WAR II RATING

HHHHH

THE BASICS Soldiers in Postmen’s Uniforms is a solitaire game in which players participate in a lesser-known World War II battle: they assume ` the role of the postal workers in the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk)—a semi-autonomous port sandwiched between Polish and German territory—who took a gallant stand against the SS and the Nazi-controlled Danzig Schutzpolizei during their attack on Polish Postal Office No. 1 on September 1, 1939. While heavily outnumbered, the Polish fighters ultimately held out for some 15 hours before their surrender.

THE OBJECTIVE Resist the Germans as long as you can and get as many defenders as possible (each of whom are assigned point values) out of the post office’s back entrance alive before the battle ends. The better players perform as the game progresses, the more intense the enemy’s attack grows.

HISTORICAL ACCURACY Soldiers in Postmen’s Uniforms takes histori-

cal accuracy to an entirely new level. A beautifully rendered map faithfully represents the post office and its surrounding neighborhood.

The postal workers are based on real-life Polish figures who fought that day, complete with names and accompanying photographs on their game pieces, and they can even be positioned in the exact post office room they fought in. The enemy is accurately presented, with varying types of attacking units (Schutzpolizei and Waffen-SS) entering the game in three separately timed waves, as they did in the actual battle. Weaponry is also recreated correctly: for example, most of the Polish defenders have rifles, but some only have pistols and thus limited shooting range.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY The game’s map is divided into two halves—the post office’s exterior and its interior—which can prove confusing at first while navigating and shooting between the two battle zones.

PLAYABILITY

The game plays smooth and fast once you master the rules. But it will take a few tries to beat the game, and even then, outcomes vary based on how many Polish defenders survive.

THE BOTTOM LINE This game is a lot of fun to play—and kudos to Dan

Verssen Games for highlighting such an interesting yet obscure World War II battle. —Chris Ketcherside is a retired Marine, a lifelong wargamer, and a PhD candidate in American history.

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BATTLE FILMS

BY MARK GRIMSLEY

REQUIEM FOR A NICE GUY IN MARCH 1974, NBC conducted a major campaign to promote “the television event of the year!”—a made-for-TV film about World War II soldier Eddie Slovik, the only American shot for desertion since the Civil War. A large advertisement, widely placed in newspapers, showed a uniform-clad man standing, head bowed, as two soldiers tie him to a post in preparation for his execution, his plaintive expression somewhat reminiscent of a puppy in the rain. The ad left no doubt for viewers about how they should feel: “For the first time in his life,” its text read, “Eddie had a good home and a good woman. Suddenly—war, panic, a court-martial

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and…The Execution of Private Slovik.”

If this weren’t enough to tug at the heartstrings, the promotion continued: “Millions served. Thousands deserted. And one—only one in over a century—paid the full price for desertion. Why Eddie Slovik, who finally had something going for him?”

Why indeed? The answer is simple: never mind what Slovik had going for him. He got what was coming to him. Nobody made more sure of that than Slovik himself.

Directed by Lamont Johnson and starring Martin Sheen in the title role, The Execution of Private Slovik is far more nuanced—and powerful—than that treacly newspaper ad; the film respects its audience far too much to tell it how to feel. Its first 20 minutes focus not on Slovik, but on the hapless collection of infantrymen plucked from the front lines and saddled with the task of executing him. They have done their duty killing Germans in the heat of battle. Now their country demands that they must kill a fellow American in cold blood. They don’t like it. Neither does army chaplain Father Stafford (movingly played by Ned Beatty), who has been assigned the task of serving as Slovik’s spiritual adviser in his final hours but who also makes a point of providing pastoral care to the execution squad.

When Stafford prods the men to tell him how they feel about the job ahead, they are reluctant to speak. Finally one opens up: “If you want to know the truth,” he says, “all of us feel pretty bad about this,” adding that he tried to get out of the assignment. “He’s a deserter,” another man states without conviction. “Lots of men are deserters,” observes a third. “None of them have been shot.”

Eventually a truck arrives carrying a group of MPs along with the condemned man himself, 24-year-old Edward Donald Slovik of Detroit, Michigan. He is soft-spoken and courteous to his captors, who plainly think he’s a nice guy. He is a nice guy. The following flashback, comprising most of the movie, makes that abundantly clear.

The flashback kicks off several years earlier, with Slovik’s release from prison on parole following a string of minor crimes.

He goes in search of an honest job and finds not just good employment but a good woman,

MCA UNIVERSAL (BOTH)

Eddie Slovik, the titular soldier sentenced to death in Lamont Johnson’s 1974 TV movie, naively expects clemency after deserting the U.S. Army in Europe.

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MCA UNIVERSAL (BOTH)

Slovik’s firing squad must kill a fellow American in cold blood—and they don’t like it.

Antoinette (Mariclare Costello), who soon becomes his wife. Slovik cares about Antoinette and the life they’re building together, and not much else; certainly not his country’s struggle to defeat the Axis powers.

The couple regards Slovik’s prison record as a shield from separation, since as a convicted felon he is automatically classified 4-F and exempt from the draft. But when heavy battlefield losses drive an urgent need for replacements, Slovik is reclassified as 1-A and conscripted into the army. He views this as inexcusably unfair; after vain attempts to get out of his service, he decides that if he must remain, he can at least make sure he survives to return to Antoinette. He deserts—not from a desire to escape, but with an urgent desire to get caught, figuring jail is preferable to dying in combat. He even writes an uncoerced confession stating that he has deserted. It promises, in all capital letters, that if sent to the front, he will desert again.

Slovik is court-martialed and convicted, which he expects, but is then sentenced to death, which is unsettling. He doesn’t believe he’ll be shot, but he figures that when the army commutes his sentence, he may end up in military prison a year or two longer than he calculated.

After all, none of the other guys convicted of desertion have been shot.

True, but none of the other convicted guys ever tried to game the system so blatantly.

The Execution of Private Slovik insists that audiences empathize with Slovik, but it does not require that they view his fate as a miscarriage of justice. Slovik expected clemency from the army justice system, but clemency is an act of mercy, a magisterial show of forbearance by a powerful authority. Slovik did not see it that way. He mistook forbearance for weakness—and strength never permits itself to be confused with weakness, even when the person confused is a nice guy. And the men assigned to remove the confusion were—as the film makes clear—other nice guys who would rather have been anywhere else. H

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DURING POLICE INTERROGATION FOLLOWING THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, LEE HARVEY OSWALD STATED, “NO, I AM NOT A COMMUNIST. I AM A _____.”

Law-abiding citizen, proud Texan, Catholic, or Marxist?

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HISTORYNET.com ANSWER: MARXIST. OSWALD WAS SHOT IN THE BASEMENT OF THE DALLAS POLICE HEADQUARTERS WHILE BEING ESCORTED TO THE CITY JAIL. OSWALD DIED LESS THAN TWO HOURS LATER AT PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, THE SAME HOSPITAL WHERE KENNEDY WAS PRONOUNCED DEAD TWO DAYS PRIOR.

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“Space: the final frontier.” If you know the words that come next, you’re already a fan of this man.

Eugene W. “Gene” Roddenberry created the television series Star Trek. But he spent the war piloting B-17s, flying 89 combat missions in the South Pacific with the 394th Bombardment Squadron and surviving several close calls, including a crash that killed two crewmen.

He continued flying after the war with Pan Am before a love of writing pulled him into the entertainment industry. Star Trek, his best-known project, debuted in 1966 and ran until 1969, spawning an industry of reruns, spin-offs, and feature films that continues to this day—and famously allowing its viewers “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

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